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The world is staring at Apple right now — anticipating a low-cost MacBook sporting a phone chip (specifically the A18 Pro) over the more powerful M-series. It’s an interesting pivot, which could be the key to fighting back against the RAM price crisis and making affordable laptops.
Well, there is only one other company who could do the same with its massive selection of chips for devices of all sizes: Qualcomm. Much like Apple silicon, Snapdragon architecture runs the whole gamut from the upcoming X2 lineage for laptops to 8 Elite mobile chips. So how does the company feel about this potentially huge pivot?
‘We feel very good’
The response from Qualcomm was simple at first, but it’s when you start to combine it with other things that were said that it starts to click into place — like a chipset sitting perfectly flush on a motherboard.
“From our perspective, there’s nobody better suited in this industry than Qualcomm to be able to address this challenge,” Kondap commented. “We have the same set of chips that are easily accessible on the phone side, as well as on the PC side. Not just that, but we have a pretty good share in tablets.”
“I feel like we’re in a very good position to go drive that, and we’ll see what the industry leads to. This is a moment where it’s going to work to our strength, but we’ll find out.”
When asked about whether Qualcomm sees the merit in using one chip in multiple types of devices over having it clearly defined for a particular category, they kept tight lipped.
“We’re not going to speculate right now, but we’ll see once we see what is out in the market and we can evaluate it.”
Apple ‘screwed that up’ in the beginning
So what will they evaluate? In my eyes, it looks like the focus will be placed on not necessarily the type of chip Apple uses, but what it will do — is the company thinking the same way as Qualcomm about certain things? Because they’re certainly not so worried about the possibility of the A18 Pro.
“It’s a two-year-old chip that has a four-channel memory interface, and we have an eight-channel interface — with stronger CPUs already in the market at the price range that people think Apple is going to be at,” Alex Katouzian, EVP of Mobile, Compute & XR commented. “I think that’s good because those sales [of Arm computers] will start to rise.”
But then, he dipped into the idea of laptop cellular connectivity — something Qualcomm has long vouched for. “One other good thing is the rumor they will put their modem inside that device,” Katouzian continued. “I think Apple screwed that up at the beginning with the iPads…$120 extra was a lot to pay at the time.”
“But ironically, if it comes back and Apple is a proponent of it, that’s a good thing for the market. So overall, good for us, good for non-x86 and also good for cellular connectivity.”
Where do we go?
Something jumped out at me here that got me thinking of two questions: what does Qualcomm’s “position” look like, and how do the laptops of the future operate?
Well, the answer in my mind came with a small reveal internally of sorts. “I’m not saying it’s going to happen, but we have the ability from our perspective to have both X1 and X2 run in parallel,” Kondap commented in response to a question about chip availability looking ahead.
But here’s the thing, I don’t think this is just about availability — this could be a huge affordability play too, while addressing future cellular connection challenges.
Apple’s turning to its phone chips, but as you’ve seen in retail, Qualcomm can hit that same price tag and keep that same higher performance level that you’d see from having more laptop-centric silicon.
It will certainly be interesting to see how this develops over time, as both Qualcomm and Apple speed ahead and really take the fight to x86 with the likes of Intel and AMD.
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