The last weeks of 2018 and the first of 2019, have not been especially good for the Cupertino-based company. From China, sales of older iPhone models were banned due to the lawsuit Qualcomm had filed against the company in the country. Fortunately for Apple, he could skip this block launching a software update.
On December 21, a German court banned sales of both iPhone 7 and iPhone 8, for a similar reason, but this time it affected a hardware item, so a software update was not a solution. The solution that Apple has found is to launch new models on the market with an updated modem that does not violate the requirement of the German court.
According to the patents to which FOSS Patents has had access, the German website WinFuture states that according to various sources responsible for the distribution of iPhone in the country, the company will introduce several modified models of iPhone 7 and iPhone 8 into the market, models that will not infringe Qualcomm's patents, so they can be sold freely in the country, both in the official Apple Store and through the different authorized resellers and in the online store.
WinFuture says Apple will start selling modified versions of iPhone 7 and iPhone 8 in about four weeks. Retailers have already received the model numbers of the new devices. The new model numbers are MN482ZD / A for a 128GB Black iPhone 7 Plus and the MQ6K2ZD / A for a 64GB iPhone 8 in space gray. Both model numbers had not been previously used by the company.
In the dispute between Apple and Qualcomm in Germany, things are more complicated than in China, since the German court that banned iPhone sales said that iPhone equipped with Intel modems infringed Qualcomm hardware patents, a hardware problem that seems that Apple has managed to solve.
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