Apple historically can't or won't bring mixed signal design in-house. It could be related to patents, standards compliance, or the much more complicated silicon design, DV, and test for analog vs digital. It's not just the modem either. The bulk of Cirrus Logic's business nowadays is making audio, haptics, and focus servo chips for Apple, and if Apple ever went vertical with those components Cirrus would collapse overnight. Yet Apple has been buying custom audio chips from them for over 30 years, so obviously this isn't a new trend.

Content of the article aside, I think these business publications are running out of thesaurus entries for clickbait titles. I wouldn't consider it a "spectacular failure" that Apple could not finish a modem in time for the iPhone 15 launch, especially considering the smashing success that they've had pushing out Intel and making some of the most popular consumer electronics on the market.

Apple should eventually find success in going vertical with the modem, and when that happens, Qualcomm will learn what being difficult costs.

Apple had planned to have its modem chip ready to use in the new iPhone models. But tests late last year found the chip was too slow and prone to overheating. Its circuit board was so big it would take up half an iPhone, making it unusable.

Considering how bad some generations of Qualcomm chips have been about this, the Apple chip must have been seriously bad.

“Just because Apple builds the best silicon on the planet, it’s ridiculous to think that they could also build a modem,” said former Apple wireless director Jaydeep Ranade, who left the company in 2018, the year the project began.

Well yeah. It's certainly much easier when you start with ARM reference designs. Apple has what, the modem IP they bought from Intel? A company that, for all its prowess, decided to give up the modem market after only a few years rather than continue to refine the modem that they already brought to market?

Even Samsung gives in and uses Qualcomm modems in the US. And they're a major provider of the baseband hardware on the other end of the connection!

Apple will get there. But there is no way that their aggressive timeline was ever reasonable. Gotta make big promises to the shareholders, I guess.