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