Steps taken by the tech giant as well as indications from its suppliers make it clear that it aims to start designing modems for the iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch. Doing so could enable the future of always-on smart glasses and augmented reality, more wearables with their own independent connections to cellular networks, Mac laptops with 5G connectivity, and faster than ever on your flagship iPhones. Download and Streaming from.
But first, the company must achieve something that has beaten other tech giants, including Intel: It must show that not only can it design its own wireless modems, but it can make them so good that Apple can now could justify switching away from the ones used. , which are made by Qualcomm, the world’s leading modem-chip maker for decades.
Applications like full augmented reality – overlaying a computer-generated reality on top of the real world, and projecting it into our eyes through smart glasses – require faster data transfer rates and lower-than-ever latency. , which is a measure of how long it takes a signal to make one round trip from a device to the Internet.
Achieving those fast-paced speeds has put an unprecedented demand on the creativity of engineers, says Durga Malladi, head of 5G and mobile infrastructure at Qualcomm, who has increased peak data-transfer rates 100-fold over the past 10 years. And all this has happened while keeping phones more or less the same size, and without the need for a comparable increase in battery capacity, he adds.
Apple keeps details of its chip operations, like the rest of its business, closely guarded secrets, and says almost nothing publicly about its aspirations. In a rare interview with my colleague Tim Higgins, Apple’s senior vice president of hardware technologies and its chip division leader Johnny Srouji discusses how it developed the A-series of iPhone microprocessors and the M-series for Macs, but refused to say anything about it. Future plans for modems or any other chips.
However, there are plenty of signposts showing where Apple is going on modem chips. The company agreed to acquire most of Intel’s smartphone-modem business in 2019, including 2,200 employees, and has since continued to hire engineers with related expertise, often in satellite offices in the same cities as its sometime partners and Technological in wireless as potential future competitors.
In San Diego, Qualcomm’s hometown, Apple is advertising about 140 posts related to the development and integration of cellular modem chips. In Irvine, California—home to the headquarters of Broadcom, which designs the critical parts that sit between a phone’s modem and its antennas—Apple has a satellite engineering office and, according to its jobs website, has about 20 open positions. .
Broadcom did not respond to requests for comment. Mr Malladi and a Qualcomm spokesperson declined to comment on the company’s relationship with Apple.
In November 2021, Qualcomm’s chief financial officer said that the company expects to supply 20% of the 5G modems used by Apple in its mobile devices by 2023. Currently, Qualcomm supplies almost 100% of these chips. (The exception is the Apple Watch, from which Series 4 models have used Intel modems.) Although it’s possible that Apple plans to use 5G modems from another supplier starting in 2023, analysts say. Hopefully this will be the year that it reveals its own, Apple-designed modem.
As was the case with Apple’s move to its own processors for iPhones and Macs, designing its own chips for cellular connectivity could give the company several advantages over competitors.
The first is cost, says Wayne Lam, senior director of research at technology consulting firm CCS Insight. According to a recent analysis of the cost of materials in the latest iPhone SE, the first version of the more affordable iPhone model with 5G capability, the chips that allow the phone to connect to cell networks, collectively cost more or less than those chips. costs more. Make up the “brain” of the phone—the A15 processor and its attached memory chips.
This is the reverse of what has been the norm in smartphones and similar mobile devices for decades: typically, the main processor of a device has been more complex and expensive than the parts that allow it to communicate wirelessly.
It would also free Apple from supplier relationships, which have been a source of tension at times for whatever benefits they provided. In 2019, for example, Apple settled a contentious court battle with Qualcomm over patent-license fees, agreeing to pay at least $4.5 billion and buy Qualcomm’s modems for several years.
Another big advantage Apple could have is that, by integrating its own modems onto the same A-series chip that powers its phones, it could replace them in ways that allow them to keep up with their current ones. Ho will make it faster, more efficient and more efficient. Combining its own chips and Qualcomm, Mr. Lam says.
In thinking about what Apple can do with its own modems, it’s worth looking at its history with its chips. Apple began its journey of designing its own chips with the A-series that go into its phones. Its ability to make them more powerful is the reason it has been able to make the M-series for Mac. Not only are these faster than the Intel-based ones they replaced, but they also use less power, allowing Apple to eliminate fans in its laptops. Similarly, by making its own modem, it could put better connectivity in smaller devices – such as its watch, and potentially smart glasses of the future – Mr. Lam says.
Wireless engineering is not for the faint of heart, but to boil down a mountain of technicalities into a single idea: The faster mobile devices communicate with the Internet, the more it matters that the device’s modem is physically is imminent, and is designed in concert with chips running all the apps and other software on a phone.
Despite Apple’s tremendous resources and growing army of wireless engineers, one thing that even the Cupertino giant may find difficult to overcome is the amount of time it takes to design, build, and then test a new wireless modem. It seems, says Prakash Sangam. Systems analyst and a former wireless engineer at AT&T and director of marketing at Qualcomm, a technology research and consulting firm.
“People often compare how Apple developed its A-series chipsets on their own, and how quickly they were able to step up their game, but in some ways a modem is more complicated,” says Mr. Sangam. In part, this complexity arises because a modem must handle a variety of conditions that can interfere with the signal—as Apple discovered more than a decade ago during its infamous “antennagate” episode. .
“If you put enough time and resources and money on it, it can be done,” he adds. “But whether they can do it by 2023, I don’t think anyone other than Apple can say.”
Apple’s first home-brewed modem may not be the best in class in terms of speed or capabilities. But the company has demonstrated that it has the patience and resources to continually release better hardware until it can create devices that are different enough from competitors to garner customer loyalty.
If the same is true for modems, it could mean that future Apple devices will do things that are not possible with existing combinations of Apple’s own chips and others. They could include adding cellular connectivity to smaller devices — possibly even AirPods — or augmented-reality experiences that feel more real than is currently possible.
“Once Apple is able to perfect the technology for 5G modems in the iPhone, all they have to do is limit that technology to a chipset that fits your Apple Glass.” says Mr. Lam.