Apple Says Its 5G Modem Will Come to More Devices, Here's Which Ones

[hans1972]

Bottom line is that Tim Cook’s putting profit margins before product performance here. But sure, let’s make excuses for it…

The whole power efficiency argument is such a poor excuse. No kidding it’s power efficient if it doesn’t do anything.

Power efficiency is more important to a lot of of iPhone users than modem transfer speed. People who buy the cheapest transfer don't download large amount of data and needs it to take only a couple of seconds.

I have a 5Gb monthly plan and 5G will allow me to use my entire monthly usage in 10 seconds. Hurray!

 

[hans1972]

Forget Ultra Wideband / mmWave (which the C1 doesn't even support), do you want to cut your sub-6GHz download speeds in half, or worse, to save 1-3% of your battery? No thanks!

Yes, I don't download large amount of data to my phone over the cell network.

All syncing of music, podcast, photos, etc. and backup up is done on Wi-Fi in the background. I don't care if it takes 10 seconds or 20 minutes.

 

[FateOfNations]

Seems that the need for an FM antenna could be a problem with available space

I think the idea is that some phones do already make this work and some modems do have a built in FM tuner. That said, I’d far prefer Apple focus its efforts on something other than getting its antena optimized down to the FM radio band. Currently the lowest band it’s tuned for is the 700 MHz band.

 

[FateOfNations]

When I suggested on Reddit that Apple should add a 4G/5G modem to the Mac, I was immediately downvoted into oblivion on Reddit. This isn’t the first time something like this has happened. It seems that whenever someone presents an idea that deviates from the norm, people are quick to shut it down, not necessarily because the idea lacks merit, but because they believe their own personal experience makes them more knowledgeable.

Given that this is also their own WiFi modem, I wouldn’t be surprised at all if it ends up in all their products, MacBooks, Apple TVs, etc. At that point, the marginal cost of enabling the cellular capability is very low. I doubt we’ll see 5G Apple TVs, but it could be useful for providing backup home internet for that mythical “home hub”, something that the Eero/Echo/Ring ecosystem offers.

 

[obviouslogic]

mmWave itself is a joke, it's only available in the US, although China has some 5G mmWave antennas but the coverage is not great.

Therefore, mmWave is not a "pro" feature essentially because you almost take advantage of it when you're in coverage and considering that only 2 countries have certain spots with that 5G coverage, it makes it totally useless

It’s actually in more countries, but usually only available in venues where large groups of people gather… In these places it makes the most sense as it’s bandwidth can deal with higher network congestion.

As an everyday, everywhere communications technology, it isn’t very practical - I mean, even rain can affect performance.

 

[MegaBlue]

The original 6-year agreement was made in April of 2019, which means that ends this April, but there was an option for a 2 year extension which they opted for, that will end in April of 2027.

The iPhone 19 will debut in the Fall of ‘27, by that time Apple’s C3 modem should be ready, and according to the report here, Apple is hoping it will perform as well as whatever Qualcomm is offering. But even if it falls a little short, who’s going to care? People are still going to buy an iPhone. Even today Apple’s top of the line iPhones do not use the fastest Qualcomm has to offer.

That…doesn’t answer anything I said.

MR is claiming C2 could appear in all the iPhone 18s. That can’t happen with the Qualcomm agreement. Why is MR making this claim?

 

[thefrost]

Good to see the modem expanding to other devices.