Apple has been working hard to develop its own cellular modem, but consumers have yet to benefit. Five years after a $1 billion purchase to accelerate the program, the latest iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max models will be forced to rely on Qualcomm technology.
Apple’s in-house modem project has been running for several years. The project kicked into high gear with the purchase of Intel’s modem division in late 2019 for $1 billion. Since then, Apple has been unable to bring the hardware up to the standard it needs to ship in a consumer-facing product. Last October saw Apple extend its supply deal with Qualcomm to provide models for iPhones shipping in 2024, 2025, and 2026.
Writing for Power On, Mark Gurman suggests that Apple’s first iPhone modem will appear in 2025, but only gradually. The earliest this could be would mean featuring in the presumptive iPhone SE due in March 2025, but it’s hard to suggest that the SE would be a niche phone.
It’s more likely that Apple follow the same path as its tetraprism optical technology and debut the modem on the iPhone 17 Pro Max, the largest and most expensive iPhone it makes. It would certainly make for a significant point of differentiation to drive consumers chasing the biggest numbers to the biggest iPhone in 2025.
It would also allow Apple to roll its own modem down to the iPhone 18 Pro alongside the 18 Pro Max in 2026 before switching the iPhone exclusively to Apple modems in September 2027.
But it’s not here yet; once more, your next iPhone will rely on Qualcomm. It’s no slouch of a modem; Qualcomm’s hardware has shipped in hundreds of millions of iPhones, let alone in the wider smartphone market. Yet it’s a modem that has to have a universal design and be capable of working with a wide range of partners, hardware combinations, and operating systems.
That’s the long-term benefit for Apple. Not to have a faster modem but to have a more efficient modem. One benefit will be that the modem will only have to address a single operating system—at this low level, iOS and iPadOS are effectively the same OS. By the same virtue, it will only have to deal with a limited number of hardware configurations. Any code Qualcomm needs to be universal and multilingual can be fixed and isolated by Apple in its own modem to work more efficiently within the ecosystem.
For now, those benefits are not arriving until next year. For now, the iPhone 16 Pro will have the best modem available, even if Apple’s ambition has its sights set higher.
Now read about the differences between the upcoming iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Pro…
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