So by now you've heard that Apple and Qualcomm settled. Two years of the ugliest patent fight in tech, a trial that had literally just started jury selection in San Diego on Monday, and then Tuesday morning it's just... over. Every device blog on earth has a version of this post up already so I'm not going to rehash the whole saga (short version: Apple thought Qualcomm's licensing fees were an illegal tax on other people's chips, Qualcomm said patents are patents, both sides spent what's probably a combined billion dollars on lawyers to fight about it). What I actually want to talk about is the part that got buried in paragraph nine of every article: Intel is out of the 5G modem business. Completely. As of this week.
That's the story that matters to me, honestly, more than the settlement itself.
Intel had been Apple's modem supplier for the last couple iPhone generations, ever since Apple got fed up with Qualcomm around 2016 and started diversifying. It wasn't a great arrangement even at 4G — the XS and XS Max last fall got dinged in every teardown and every carrier speed test for lagging behind Qualcomm-equipped Android phones on LTE performance. I've got an XS Max sitting next to me right now and honestly the signal in my apartment (I'm on the third floor, concrete building, not great to begin with) has always felt a notch worse than my old phone. I chalked it up to being paranoid. Turns out it probably wasn't just me.
Intel was supposed to be Apple's ticket to a 5G iPhone that didn't depend on Qualcomm at all. That was the whole point. And the timing here is not subtle — the settlement drops Tuesday morning, and by Tuesday afternoon Intel puts out a statement saying it's exiting the 5G smartphone modem business altogether. They're not pretending this is unrelated. You don't spend years building toward a product category and then fold the exact same day your only customer makes peace with your one competitor unless the writing was already on the wall.
Which means, practically, Apple has nowhere else to go. If you want a 5G iPhone, it is getting a Qualcomm modem in it, full stop, because there isn't really a third option anymore that's shipping at scale (MediaTek is out there but nobody's betting the iPhone on MediaTek). Samsung makes its own but isn't selling them to Apple. So the leverage Apple spent two years and untold legal fees trying to build against Qualcomm evaporated in about six hours.
I'll say the unpopular thing here: I don't think this is actually bad for consumers, even though it looks like Qualcomm "won." A single company controlling basically all the premium modem silicon is a genuinely bad structural situation and I'd have liked to see it stay competitive. But Intel's mobile modem division, if I'm being honest, was never that good. Their baseband team came out of the old Infineon acquisition and it always felt a step behind. If the choice was "Intel eventually catches up in 5G in 2021 or so" versus "Qualcomm has 5G phones working now," the market was going to pick the second one regardless of what Apple wanted.
Reportedly Apple's paying Qualcomm a settlement figure that's landed in some reports in the billions (nobody's confirmed an exact number publicly, and I'd take any specific figure floating around right now with a grain of salt), plus there's a new six-year license deal and a chip supply agreement bundled in. So Qualcomm didn't just win the fight, it locked in the customer for most of a decade.
Meanwhile there's apparently a stack of Intel employees who spent years on 5G modem silicon who now get to find out what "exiting the business" means for their jobs, which is the part nobody's leading with because it's not as fun to write about as billion dollar lawsuits. Worth remembering there are actual people behind these quarterly filings.
Anyway. If you were hoping this fight would end with more modem options in phones, it didn't. It ended with fewer.