Multiple reports had come saying that Apple is planning to ditch other vendors and use its own in-house 5G modem on the future iPhones. Apple had reportedly made big investments for coming up with its own 5G modem for the A-Bionic chipsets. But the move has failed, and the company will keep relying on Qualcomm for 5G modems. Apple doesn’t want to rely on third-party companies for modems. An in-house 5G modem would have also meant lower costs of manufacturing. However, that will not happen anytime soon now.
Qualcomm Was Only Expected to Ship 20% of the 5G Modems for iPhones in 2023
According to the latest report from Apple analyst Ming Chi-Kuo, Qualcomm was only expected to ship around 20% of the 5G modems in 2023 for iPhones. But now, the complete shipment of the 5G modems during the year will be made exclusively by Qualcomm.
For the unaware, back in 2019, Apple had acquired the modem chip business of Intel and was planning to move away from Qualcomm. There has been a huge legal battle as well between Apple and Qualcomm over the licensing fees. While it settled, it would have definitely made the relationship sour between the two.
Apple isn’t likely going to back down completely here. While the move hasn’t paid off right away, Apple is expected to keep working on developing its 5G modem. The best thing for Apple is that it has a huge pool of funds to do it. Other companies have to kill projects because of a lack of money. There’s no such concern with Apple as it makes the kind of money that hardly any tech company does in the world. For now, there’s no saying when we will see the first iPhone with an in-house 5G modem. Whether it would be a performance booster is not is also something that can’t be said right now.
