Apple Turns Up Speakers, AR

Release time：2017-06-06
author：Ameya360
source：EE Times
reading：1061

　　Apple announced a $349, Siri-powered speaker, leveraging its expertise in music against rivals Amazon and Google. It also rolled out developer’s kits for augmented reality and machine learning on iOS 11 and upgraded its Macintosh and iPad computers.

　　The HomePod is a 6.8-inch speaker driven by an Apple A8 SoC to handle echo cancellation and optimize sound for a given space. It packs a four-inch woofer and an array of seven tweeters, each with its own driver to deliver better sound than smart speakers such as Alexa and Google Home.

　　“This is really going after Sonos and Bose home speakers--the audio is superior to Sonos--music is in Apple’s DNA,” said Tim Bajarin, president of market watcher Creative Strategies (Campbell, Calif.). “It’s not designed like Amazon’s Alexa as a front end to online stores…my gut says they will sell millions of these as a powerful home speaker,” he added.

　　Nevertheless, HomePod sports a six-mic array to respond to natural language commands, putting a toe in the water of the smart-speaker market Amazon dominates. HomePod does not enable the range of some 12,000 tasks of Alexa or the range of queries Google supports. Initially, HomePod is prepped for a short list of topics that include music, traffic, weather, stock quotes, unit conversions and translating between a small set of language pairs.

　　Apple’s Siri agent on the iPhone is available in 21 languages, although the HomePod will initially ship only for English. Apple also announced a new translation service in Siri between English, Chinese and the four most popular European languages.

　　The speakers also can be used to control home automation devices built to work with Apple’s HomeKit, which now sports AirPlay 2. The upgraded protocol supports multi-room audio, shared playlists and control via Apple TV.

　　A dozen speaker makers are supporting the protocol as part of a new HomeKit speaker category. “We want to reinvent home music,” said Tim Cook, Apple chief executive, in rolling out HomePod.

　　HomePod, shipping in December, also aims to increase subscribers to Apple Music. The subscription service launched recently now has 27 million subscribers and competes with rivals such as Spotify and Pandora.


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Apple Reveals Qualcomm Patent Fees
Trade news

Apple Reveals Qualcomm Patent Fees

Qualcomm charges a 5% royalty, or about $12 to $20, per smartphone plus a large “CDMA tax,” Apple’s chief operating officer testified in an antitrust case here. The testimony put on the record some details of Qualcomm’s licensing practices that have long drawn industry complaints.Apple struck a deal with Qualcomm in 2007 to set royalties on iPhones at $7.50 per handset. In 2011, the two struck a deal to keep royalties at the same level while giving Qualcomm “short-term” exclusivity as the iPhone’s cellular baseband supplier.The “7.50 [royalty] may not sound like a lot, but it [amounted to] billions of dollars a year,” said Jeff Williams, who led the first iPhone team and is now Apple’s COO. “It is not FRAND, in our view, compared to everyone else … Qualcomm charged more than everyone else together.”“The alternative was that it defaults to the contract manufacturer’s rate of $17 to $18 [per phone, and] if we pursued them legally, we wouldn’t have access to chips … [and] risk getting our brand-new iPhone enjoined,” said Williams, adding, “Qualcomm represented [$7.50] as the average price paid.”Although patent licensing at the handset level has become widely used, Apple found it unfair.“We led the charge to add a lot of NAND memory” in handsets, but “if we put an extra $100 in NAND, they would get $5 of that even though they didn’t have anything to do with it,” he said. Apple spends “an extra $60 in stainless steel enclosures, and Qualcomm would collect an extra $3 — that didn’t make sense to us, and it still doesn’t today,” he added.The original $7.50 royalty “didn’t apply to CDMA phones or iPads,” said Williams, later calling licensing terms for the cellular protocol that Qualcomm developed “roughly a $250 million CDMA tax.”Apple initially proposed that it pay $1.50 per baseband chip used. Under the final deal, Apple’s contract manufacturers paid Qualcomm its usual 5% handset royalty under their existing patent licenses, Apple reimbursed them, and Qualcomm reimbursed Apple. Apple avoided striking a patent deal directly with Qualcomm under the arrangement.As part of the 2011 deal, Apple asked Qualcomm for a billion dollars to transition from using Infineon basebands.“They wanted exclusivity,” Williams said. “We proposed that we’d give them 100% sole-sourced for the short term, [but] in the long term, that wasn’t our plan.”However, “long-term [exclusivity] provisions wound up in the agreement … [and] made it prohibitively expensive to work with someone else,” he added. “For example, it cut off work with Intel” on a baseband for an iPad Mini in 2013 … overall, “our strategy is to dual-source.”Today, “Qualcomm continues to ship products on [Apple] design wins they have,” Williams said. “We have been unable to get them to support us on new design wins since [Apple sued Qualcomm in 2017]. This has been a challenge.”“Our strategy was to dual-source [basebands] in 2018,” he said. “We were working toward doing that with Qualcomm, but in the end, they would not support us and sell us chips.”As a result, “I went to [Intel CEO] Brian Krzanich and said that I was sorry, but instead of 50%, I need 100%” of iPhone basebands. “He had to scramble and go to his board to get almost a billion in capital to support us,” Williams said.Meanwhile, Qualcomm “is suing us in court all over the world on non-essential patents,” he said. “They are trying to get a hit in any one of those courts with an injunction to cause enough pain to make us pay tens of billions of dollars in their ransom … They said [that Apple is] an ideal target [because] unless [we] run the table, they will win.”In testimony Friday, Qualcomm’s CEO gave his own views on the deal and its efforts to continue working with Apple.Under cross-examination, a Qualcomm attorney noted that Apple gave the chip vendor a “moonshot challenge” to deliver a single chip baseband for LTE. The chip made it into the iPhone 5. In its launch, Apple founder Steve Jobs called the chip “one of the real breakthroughs” of the handset.
2019-01-15 00:00 reading：3356
Apple Testifies in Q’com Patent Case
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Apple Testifies in Q’com Patent Case

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At the time Apple was trying to reduce the cost of Qualcomm baseband chips it was using by conducting an analysis of manufacturing costs at TSMC where both companies both made chips.Amon “finally leveled with me. He said, ‘I just came back from an investors conference and I am under intense pressure to monitize [our technology] and I will have whatever the market can bear and Apple can afford to pay this — we don’t need to talk about costs and margins.’”Blevins said he canceled the rest of his meetings for the day. “We needed to do something different or we would be in a bad place, [so] we kicked off a new project to find an alternative supplier” called Project Antique, Blevins said.The effort ultimately led to exclusive use today of cellular modems from Intel’s wireless group, which has its heritage in the Infineon group that was the sole supplier for the first two generations of iPhones, a Qualcomm attorney noted.“We made this challenge, so Qualcomm was no longer willing to sell us chips…we want both Qualcomm and Intel in the mix — competition leads to…more diligent technical schedules and innovation,” Blevins said.Qualcomm’s alleged use of a unique practice of linking patent licensing deals to chip sales is at the heart of the case. Blevins said it first came to his attention in a 2005 letter from Qualcomm in response to Apple’s request for baseband samples and specs as part of an evaluation for the original iPhone.“In substitute of samples, we got this letter” asking for a patent license first. “In 20 years in this industry I had never seen a letter like this…Our interpretation was ‘no license, no chips,’” Blevins said.Qualcomm also asked for a cross-license to Apple’s IP.  “We were taken aback. We knew we would not cross license our IP back to them, we were [just] going to buy a chip,” he said.About two years ago, NXP asked Apple to sign a patent license in exchange for access to its NFC chips. “I was on vacation...and called [the NXP] CEO that day and said if they want more money put it in the hardware [price] and [we’ll see if] it's competitive. They withdrew their request for a license that day,” he said.Apple and Qualcomm struck five patent and supply agreements from 2007 to 2013. The latest ones included deals to get large rebates of royalties pad in exchange for exclusive use of Qualcomm modems.Qualcomm executives Derek Aberle and Amon both suggested Apple could get a “royalty less than $10 [per handset] only if we brought additional value to the table — if you bring me exclusivity,” Blevins said.Apple considered the reduced royalties to be still higher than those paid by its rivals, but they didn’t “gouge us…They made it very unattractive to choose another supplier…it was no longer a level playing field as it was before,” he added.Due to the exclusivity deal, Blevins cancelled plans in the works to use an Intel data-only cellular modem in an iPad Mini 2. Apple had internally agreed the design win would be a step to working Intel modems into iPhones.In a call to Hermann Eul, then Intel's general manager, “I expressed misgivings. They hadn’t don’t anything [wrong, but] we had an agreement with Qualcomm,” he said.In another meeting, the head of Qualcomm’s licensing group, Eric Reifschneider, asserted his dominance over Amon, who led the chip group, Blevins reported.“Cristiano was speaking directly to me, and Eric cut him off and said, ‘I run a division that makes two-thirds of corporate profits and you make one third, so let’s be clear who does the talking,’ I felt it was inappropriate in front of a customer to make such a statement and unfair to Cristiano,” Blevins said.Qualcomm would not agree to terms of supply agreements Apple considered standard with other suppliers, driving harder deals around patents, Belvins said. “It was uncommon for me to deal with any company’s licensing team, but with Qualcomm it became common,” he added.A Qualcomm attorney noted that in 2007-2009 agreements, Apple agreed to pay Qualcomm royalties although it did not buy its chips then. Apple continues to consider Mediatek and Samsung as alternative baseband suppliers and in the past had considered ST Ericsson and Texas Instruments as well, she noted.The FTC continued its case Friday with testimony from licensing and procurement executives from Samsung and Lenovo’s Motorola group.
2019-01-14 00:00 reading：1265
Apple's China struggles highlight US companies' trade war vulnerabilities
Trade news

Apple's China struggles highlight US companies' trade war vulnerabilities

Apple — one of the world's most valuable public companies by market capitalization and a bellwether for the technology sector — slashed its revenue guidance on Wednesday, highlighting just how vulnerable large American companies are to the ongoing U.S.-Chinatrade war.Apple CEO Tim Cook told CNBC's Josh Lipton that the trade dispute between the world's two largest economies is exacerbating economic issues in China, which is an important source of revenue for the company.Other companies could face similar problems, according to experts."Weakening iPhone sales in China highlight the vulnerability of many U.S. multinationals to the U.S.-China trade war, both due the exposure of their manufacturing supply chains to China and because of the growing importance of China as a key consumer market for many U.S. products," said Rajiv Biswas, Asia Pacific chief economist at IHS Markit.Although data showed China's economy holding up for much of 2018, it now appears to be slowing as production metrics and export orders fall amid the country's dispute with the U.S., its largest trading partner.The fallout from a Chinese economic slowdown is likely to extend to other sectors like consumer spending — potentially hitting American companies that are doing business in Asia's largest economy."The U.S. is not the ultimate and unequivocal consumer with powers to dictate U.S.-China trade terms; given ... the undeniably large Chinese market with an aspirational and savvy middle class," said Vishnu Varathan, head of economics and strategy at Mizuho Bank."As such, U.S.-China trade disputes will be bumpy given the gap between U.S. President Donald Trump's perceived sense of leverage and a much more modest reality," Varathan told CNBC.Washington and Beijing agreed in early December to pause tariff escalations, but headlines about the ongoing negotiations have continued to send jitters through the market. Prior to that agreement, China and the U.S. had gone back and forth threatening to implement levies on billions of dollars worth of imports.While high profile, Apple's status in China is unlikely to be a bargaining chip in the trade negotiations, said Dan Wang, analyst at the Economist Intelligence Unit. "It's not a core technolo(gy) that both countries want," she said.However, if the trade dispute escalates, Apple products such as the iPhone may be subjected to higher tariffs imposed by both sides.The "iPhone's vulnerability to the US-China trade war serves as a red flag warning of the importance of concluding a U.S.-China trade deal in early 2019 to end the bilateral trade dispute and remove market fears about further escalation of the trade war," said IHS' Biswas.After all, in the case of smartphones, the Chinese burgeoning consumer class has a plethora of iPhone alternatives to choose from — especially if a trade war with the U.S. sparks anti-American sentiments that extend to products."An antagonistic U.S. may only tip the balance in favor of Chinese consumers adopting home-made devices rather than products like Apple," said Varathan.Louis Kuijs, head of Asia Economics at Oxford Economics, echoed that sentiment, telling CNBC that "this whole trade conflict between the U.S. and China is also affecting a little bit the choices that Chinese people make when they buy phones at the moment."
2019-01-07 00:00 reading：1237
Apple's iPhone sales warning is crushing European chip stocks, AMS dives 19%
Trade news

Apple's iPhone sales warning is crushing European chip stocks, AMS dives 19%

European chip stocks tumbled on Thursday after Apple cut its first-quarter revenue guidance citing weaker-than-expected iPhone sales and slowing economic growth in China.Austrian chipmaker AMS nosedived 19 percent while Swiss firm STMicroelectronics dropped around 7 percent. Both companies are semiconductor suppliers for Apple devices.Shares of Anglo-German chip supplier Dialog Semiconductors plunged 7 percent at the open in Frankfurt. In October, Apple agreed to buy a portion of Dialog's business in a $600 million deal.Other chip stocks including Dutch firm ASM International and Germany-based Siltronic also fell at the open amid pressure in the semiconductor industry. The broader European Stoxx 600 tech index was the worst performing sector in Europe on Thursday, trading down around 2 percent.The moves in Europe followed losses in Asia's tech sector among Apple suppliers.Apple CEO Tim Cook issued a letter to investors Wednesday lowering the iPhone maker's fiscal first quarter revenue guidance to $84 billion, down from a previous range of $89 billion to $93 billion.In an interview with CNBC's Josh Lipton on Wednesday, Cook said trade tensions between the U.S. and China were one factor weighing on the tech giant's outlook.Apple shares traded down roughly 7 percent in extended hours on Thursday. Several Apple suppliers have cut their outlook in recent months citing weak demand.
2019-01-04 00:00 reading：1267
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