[telecom] Apple, Let Us Tune into Those FM Radio Channels

Incipient paranoia department: given the fact that board designers

> have a religion called "minimum parts count", and that electrical > engineers obsess over every femtoamp in a battery-powered > environment, I find myself wondering what an unused FM receiver chip > is doing in an iPhone in the first place.

As the article notes, phones' FM chips are commonly enabled in other countries (it cites a figure of 80 percent in Mexico, for instance). Apple doesn't want to manufacture multiple variant iPhone models for different national markets if it can avoid it, so it's presumably cheaper to just include the FM chip even if it isn't activated in some countries.

Bob Goudreau Cary, NC

Reply to
Bob Goudreau
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In article you write:

They're commonly found in the US on Android devices, such as my Samsung tablet.

The FM radio in a phone or tablet only works when you plug in headphones, because the cable is the FM antenna. Recent iPhones don't have a headphone jack. I suppose it's hypothetically possible that they could do it with a USB thing, but now you have to retrieve the FM signal from the electrically noisy USB system rather than the audio system.

R's, JOhn

Reply to
John Levine

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