Apple expands to San Diego: the company has just purchased an area of land equal to about 27 hectares in Rancho Bernardo, near the Californian city, and aims to create a hardware and software development hub. According to local newspaper reports, the area was once owned by HP: it was one of the company’s campuses dedicated to the development of inkjet printers. Apparently, the hub’s main focus will be on developing proprietary modems.
The hub, which is called (was it called?) Rancho Vista Corporate Center, cost Apple $ 445 million, according to the San Diego Union-Tribune. It seems that it is the first concrete investment of the Apple in the city, if we exclude the commercial ones for shops and related infrastructures. Apple initially planned to create around 1,200 jobs for the hub, but apparently they have increased significantly – that’s 5,000 full-time people by 2026.
The initiative to build a new hub in San Diego had even been announced in 2019: the goal was to start with the works towards the end of the year, but then the pandemic broke out and it is reasonable to assume that there were hitches and delays. It is interesting to observe a particular detail on the timing of the event: the announcement of the hub had arrived just a few weeks before that of the acquisition of the entire modem division of Intel, one of the main consequences of the stop to the legal battle between Qualcomm and Apple for the royalties on the patents of its modems.
To recap very briefly: Apple no longer wanted to pay Qualcomm licenses to exploit modem patents because they thought they were too high, so they decided to take the matter to court and at the same time turn to the competition for modems. The competition, namely Intel, did not live up to expectations and therefore Apple decided to find an agreement with Qualcomm. At the same time, however, he started thinking about developing a proprietary modem, just as he did for SoCs years ago. Initially, the plan was to integrate the new “Apple Modems” by 2023, therefore with the hypothetical iPhone 15; but it recently emerged that the two companies have renewed their licensing agreements until 2025, suggesting that there have been delays.