It wasn’t entirely impossible to reach this conclusion through sensible speculation alone.
You don’t need to be Apple to know they only had three options for modems really:
1. Keep buying from Qualcomm.
2. Try and prop up Intel’s modem efforts in hope it becomes viable competitor to Qualcomm to either increase leverage or just get Intel good enough that you don’t need Qualcomm anymore.
3. Build own modems.
They tried to make 2. work, and 3. as others have noted simply isn’t viable for several years at least presumably.
Given Intel’s pretty poor track record at entering into new markets and succeeding, it wasn’t a bad bet that 2. and 3. was doomed to failure forcing a retreat to 1.
We already knew from hardware tests that Intel’s 4G modems are not competitive with Qualcomm’s too, so not unreasonable to speculate the future 5G ones might not be as good either. Thanks to Intel’s press release the other day we can largely confirm too that their 5G modems weren’t going to be competitive.
This article suggests there was also option 4, which is not something I’d have as easily speculated:
4. Try to engineer legal/market conditions that will negatively affect Qualcomm’s business to drive modem prices down.
It is this option that seems to have failed this week, if this article’s analysis of Apple’s strategy is correct.
