Broadcom Inks Multi-Year Supply Deals With Apple to Provide Wireless Components and Modules – MacRumors

Broadcom? I just assumed they got all this from Qualcomm which they signed up with last year as well.

This is mainly for Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chipsets. Nothing to do with cellular chipsets. The article could make this a bit more clear.

Broadcom’s once-huge client Wi-Fi business has been decimated by the combination of Intel’s bundling and Ralink/MediaTek from Taiwan. They already sold the IOT business to Cypress. Similarly, their mobile business is under pressure from Qualcomm and MediaTek integrating these pieces into their baseband. I think their infrastructure AP/home router business is what’s left.

Qualcomm and Intel seem to have better client side chips. Qualcomm even on the router/AP side also seems better but I can see Apple wanting to counterbalance vendors, which is practical from a business perspective.

Broadcom’s WiFi chips generally seem to be inferior to Qualcomm since the first Wave 2 AC chips came out at least in terms the extras such as MU-MIMO where they actually at times could reduce performance significantly and even in AX in testing by SmallNetbuilder their AX chipset based routers showed a weird dip in performance in the 5Ghz band. I can imagine the client side chips like the ones Apple buys are just as lacking, the again of course I could be wrong…