The be honest, American companies never had a monopoly in any of the parts needed to build a commercially viable phone. Unlike say in the PC world, where the dominant OS/Software stack has an almost impenetrable reliance on x86, phones were mostly ARM based (in an attempt to prevent Intel's chokehold). And communication standards require FRAND patent grants allowing anyone to build for the spec.<p>That said, even as recently as a decade back, China was routinely written off as a cheap imitation of US/Japan/Korea in the electronics industry, Huawei & friends have proven otherwise. Their flagships are on par with the Apples and Samsungs, and even lead them on velocity of feature releases, especially hardware
I checked out a Huawei store - they're the same asthetic as an apple store with a ton more useful tech then an ipod, macbook and imac.<p>The phones were impressive and very affordable. We're talking $200-300 for 6gb ram devices, 128gb storage, etc.<p>Google, Apple are right to be worried.
This is really impressive for Huawei. I do not mean to say that the trade war between China and the US is the same as the Cold War from before, but I have a fun tidbit to share.<p>One of the more interesting theories I heard for why the US won the Cold War is because Russia struggled to develop IC technology. The Russians were masters of espionage, and I would even give them the edge in mechanical engineering, but the United States' ability to master electrical engineering proved more important. They just couldn't build computers like the US, and computers proved to be <i>wildly</i> important for technological breakthroughs.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_computing_in_the_Soviet_Union" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_computing_in_the_So...</a><p>Now that Huawei has figured out how to do it without us, it's really become autonomous. This is great news for China, and will help them enormously in the ongoing trade war. And obviously it's not so great for the US.
Even if those chips are completely devoid of American-origin IP cores, they almost certainly were designed with American-origin EDA software.<p>I am not sure if such chips would be covered by existing export bans or if EDA software licensing agreements prohibit export of produced design files to countries subject to US export bans.<p>If neither is the case, I expect either or both to change soon.
It's worth noting that Chinese smartphones without any US components have been available for a <i>long</i> time, based around SoCs from Mediatek and Spreadtrum/RDA.
I predicted this and it will continue: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20303157" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20303157</a><p>I think we are in this awkward time where China is shifting from playing catch up to the US to taking more of a lead in some areas that are meaningful. This type of transition is awkward for all involved, but it was going to happen and these sanctions moved it forward a bit.<p>I am still surprised that the sanctions didn't have that much of a financial effect on China or at least us in the west didn't notice it very much.
"Once bitten, twice shy."<p>"Never turn away a paying customer."<p>Once those markets go, they never come back. And you're on the slippery slope to irrelevance.
Don't worry. Huawei barely gets to manage the fund itself from Chinese banks. And the moment that US DOJ launches secondary boycott on Huawei and its financial affiliates & financiers, believe me -- it won't last months.<p>The most important thing is the financial power. The current wrestle between China and the US (entailing Huawei and Chinese trade deals) is all about the US wanting to forcefully open up Chinese financial markets -- which China will never do.<p>It would be exciting to see how the new trade deals would unfold.
Huawei had to license synopsys/cadence/mentor to design their chip(which is using ARM core), if US really wants to play hardball Huawei's IC design can be killed nearly instantly once those CAD design software is forbidden. In the meantime I heard Huawei etc bought a few years' license right before the trade war, they're actually well prepared.<p>Another way is to restrict chip manufacturing, Taiwan pretty much owns the best technology for that(TSMC), Intel/Samsung has some, Huawei has none.<p>And you have Android to some degree, without Android there is no Smartphone dominance from China as of now. Open source in general helped China to catch up and overtake the west extremely efficiently, you don't need any business spies anymore, just download/modify/profit.<p>At the moment USA still has the possibility to contain IC ecosystem if it really wants to do that. In 10~20 years it will be a different story though, by then USA might not have much leverage if anything at all left.
I think the US is making a big mistake by falling back to isolationism and confrontation in a sort of last-ditch attempt to reign Chinese progress in.<p>The prevailing quite chauvinistic attitude among many people outside of Asia is that because of their lack of political liberalism China or other Asian countries will always be stuck with copying or being the manufacturing bench. I think this will turn out to be a grave miscalculation and that the trade wars will only accelerate the decoupling and strengthen the Chinese regime's narrative to develop at all costs.<p>I think many people in the West really are not aware how deeply the resentment goes in Chinese society to not be bullied around ever again, the mentality really is 'better-broken jade than intact tile', and it's hard to compete with that.
Articles whose content contradict their headlines are rather quite frustrating. The title is "Huawei Manages to Make Smartphones Without American Chips"<p>But the article itself states: "While Huawei hasn’t stopped using American chips entirely, it has reduced its reliance on U.S. suppliers or eliminated U.S. chips in phones launched since May"<p>And it's graph shows significant usage of US chips.<p>I'm sure Huawei is trying it's best to reduce its dependence on US chips, and thanks to access to chips from the EU, Taiwan, JP, it likely will succeed. But I can't help but be annoyed at the thought that Taiwan and Japan are relying on the US to protect them from the same CCP they're short sightedly profiting from.
The US basically started a slow-motion kidnapping of Meng Wanzhou in December 2018. The ban on US shipments to Huawei might have sped the process up, but I imagine they already saw this as personal.<p>Best of luck to them I say.
How likely it is that Huawei got access to the technology behind Samsung's Exynos[1] to speed up the development of their own ARM chips? At least that's what happened with Samsung's foldable screen technology[2].<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exynos" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exynos</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-29/south-korea-charges-11-with-selling-samsung-technology-to-china" rel="nofollow">https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-29/south-kor...</a>