Apple’s purchase of Intel’s 5G smartphone modem business in 2019 may begin to pay dividends by 2023, as indicated by investigator Ming-Chi Kuo in a report from they. Apple’s first iPhones utilizing its own custom-designed 5G chips will show up in 2023 “at the earliest,” he wrote. In the event that that proves accurate, Apple will depend on Qualcomm to supply its modems for at any rate a couple more generations of iPhones.
“We predict that the iPhone will adopt Apple’s own design 5G baseband chips in 2023 at the earliest,” the report states. “As Android sales in the high-end 5G phone market are sluggish, Qualcomm will be forced to compete for more orders in the low-end market to compensate for Apple’s order loss.”
The new gossip lines up with a new Barclays report that guaranteed Apple’s custom 5G modems would show up in 2023 iPhones, as MacRumors notes. Given the difficulties that Apple and Intel had implementing a 5G modem, it’s not amazing that it’s requiring some investment to develop its own chips.
Apple at present uses Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X55 modem in current iPhone 12 models and is relied upon to utilize the X60 and X65 modems in the 2021 and 2022 models. When the organization changes to its own modems, it might decrease supply constraints (and in this way costs) on 5G modems, making the technology more feasible for low-end smartphones, as per Kuo.