After publicly calling out Apple earlier this week with claims that their new 64-bit A7 chip was no more than a “marketing gimmick” with no actual benefit to consumers. Qualcomm Senior Vice President and chief marketing officer Anand Chandrasekher has now retracted his false and malicious claims.
The original statement can be found below, originally reported by TechHive on Tuesday:
“I know there’s a lot of noise because Apple did [64-bit] on their A7,” said Anand Chandrasekher, senior vice president and chief marketing officer at Qualcomm, in an interview. “I think they are doing a marketing gimmick. There’s zero benefit a consumer gets from that.”
And the retraction, also via TechHive:
“The comments made by Anand Chandrasekher, Qualcomm CMO, about 64-bit computing were inaccurate,” said a Qualcomm spokesperson in an email. “The mobile hardware and software ecosystem is already moving in the direction of 64-bit; and, the evolution to 64-bit brings desktop class capabilities and user experiences to mobile, as well as enabling mobile processors and software to run new classes of computing devices.”
Qualcomm did not provide further comment.”
Apple is one of Qualcomm’s single largest customers, ordering many millions of chips each year for their Macs and iOs devices. So, to get this straight, Mr. Chandrasekher, apparently jealous that Apple had managed to go 64-bit before Qualcomm, made some false and spiteful comments. He then only retracted those comments when called out by the media, and apparently chastised by a superior, who set the record straight.
How sweet.
Moral of the story: Don’t make false and malicious claims against your largest customer without giving it a pretty good long talk.
