Apple is in the process of designing their own cellular modems after buying the business and patents from Intel last year. They currently buy them from Qualcomm and Qualcomm has an unusually licensing model. They charge a fixed percentage of the sale prices of devices containing their modems. That means that a Macbook with a price of $1500 to $4000 might cost a lot more to cover the Qualcomm license .
To support cellular, they are going to have to do some adjustments to how Mac OS treats data connections. You can have it downloading large updates in the background and killing your data plan in the first hour. Low power mode may be a first step in this direction.
Interesting. Never knew about Qualcomm taking a fixed percentage of the device's sales price. That's a lot of money.
No wonder Apple is so desperate to make its own modems.
I bet we will see a 5G option once Apple can make its own.
Also, it seems like the 5G modem isn't integrated into the SoC itself is because it's a separate Qualcomm chip. Once Apple makes it own, we can see 5G integrated into every iPhone, iPad, and Mac SoC. I doubt Apple will make two different SoCs, one with and one without 5G transistors. Apple could just disable/enable the 5G modem in the SoC depending on the configuration users choose.
