Apple reportedly has a three plan for rolling out its in-house made modems, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reports (a subscription is required to read the article).
He says the company will debut its first modem in an iPhone SE next year, and roll out a high-end version in 2026. Gurman says the 2025 modem won’t match the capabilities of those made by Qualcomm.
Analyst Ming-Chi Kuo said in an X post in September that shipments of Apple’s in-house 5G chip will reach 35-40 million units in 2025, and “grow rapidly” to 90-110 million units in 2026 and 160-180 million units in 2027.
He said the modem’s chip will be able to achieve theoretical 5G download speeds of up to 4 Gbps, which would be slower than Qualcomm modems in current iPhones. He expects a second generation Apple-built 5G modem will debut in the iPhone 18 lineup in 2026 and in iPad Pro models by 2027. Gurman thinks this modem will better compete with Qualcomm’s modems by adding support for the ultra-fast 5G standard known as mmWave.
He predicts the second modem will achieve theoretical download speeds of up to 6 Gbps. In 2027, he expects Apple to release its third-generation modem with the goal of beating Qualcomm’s modems in terms of performance and artificial intelligence features. Eventually, Apple may merge the modem into the iPhone’s A-series chip.
Apple currently uses Qualcomm modems. However, the tech giant certainly plans to build its own modems. Apple acquired Intel’s smartphone modem business in July 2019 and added 2,200 Intel engineers to its chipset operations globally.
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