Apple’s work on a long rumored wireless modem appears to finally be coming to a head. A new report from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman earlier this month suggests that next spring’s rumored iPhone SE refresh will bring the first Apple-designed wireless modem, a noteworthy shift from the company’s recent reliance on chips from Qualcomm, the current industry leader for cellular modems.
According to Gurman, Apple will take a gradual ramp-up with its modem ambitions. Next year will see the hardware appear in the more affordable iPhone SE, the iPhone 17 “Slim” and some cellular-connected entry-level iPads.
He says that the first-generation modem is not as “advanced” as the Qualcomm chips in today’s flagship iPhone 16 line and isn’t capable of handling higher-frequency 5G spectrum like millimeter-wave, which Verizon and AT&T have deployed in parts of major cities, airports and stadiums for super-fast connections.
The modem is also said to be limited to four-channel carrier aggregation, which is a drop-off from Qualcomm’s latest chips. Carrier aggregation allows for combining multiple bands of wireless spectrum to increase data speeds. While Apple’s initial modems may not be as fast as Qualcomm’s latest, Gurman says it “caps out at download speeds of about 4 gigabits per second” in lab tests.
While the real world is very different from controlled lab experiments, if Apple can deliver even a fraction of that bandwidth consistently it should be fine for most people’s daily use of streaming, messaging, video calling and social media sharing.
While higher-end modems are said to be coming from Apple in 2026 and 2027 that might outperform Qualcomm’s future chips, plenty is riding on Apple to nail its modem right out of the box. You only need to look back at 2010’s iPhone 4 “antennagate” to see how badly messing with connectivity can go.
A cautionary tale
Steve Jobs referred to the situation as “Antennagate,” but said that getting signal loss from holding the iPhone 4 was “not unique” when compared to other smartphones.
The iPhone 4 was Apple’s first big redesign of the iPhone and featured an all-new antenna design with cutouts along the sides of the phone that allowed the company to turn the phone’s stainless steel bands into parts of the antenna for Wi-Fi, GPS, Bluetooth and, of course, cellular connectivity.
The problem, as users quickly found out, was that holding the phone in your hand without a case could easily interfere with the signal. This led to a press conference, a public letter, software updates to fix how cellular signal strength is displayed, lawsuits, free cases and eventually a settlement.
Despite leaking when it was mistakenly left in a bar months before release, Apple’s famed secrecy may have played a role in limiting public testing of the iPhone 4. The leak showed that Apple was testing its phone in cases designed to mimic the appearance of an iPhone 3G or 3GS. Ultimately using a case helped fix the “antennagate” issue, which largely appeared when users would use their phones without one.
A Bloomberg report in 2010, however, suggested that at least one Apple engineer raised concerns to management about the design.
The saga was a black eye for Apple though obviously it did little to slow the iPhone’s meteoric rise. By the time the iPhone 4S rolled around, the antenna issues were solved and today’s iPhones continue to feature cutouts along both sides of the phone and work without any cellular connectivity issues (little cutouts for antennas along the sides of devices have also become commonplace on Android phones from Samsung, Google and others).
Gurman says that “Apple has been secretly testing the new modem on hundreds of devices deployed to employees globally” and “doing quality assurance testing with its carrier partners around the world,” which is good news for the new modem.
“There is always a risk with introducing new silicon, especially one that controls so much of the experience, and that’s why I always thought they would introduce the first generation on a cheaper, less risky device like the iPhone SE or iPad Mini,” Anshel Sag, principal analyst at Moor Insights and Strategy, says.
He notes that by taking this approach, Apple can “get the modems out into the real world and squash whatever bugs exist without risking the mainline iPhone business profitability.”
Avi Greengart, president and lead analyst of Techsponential, seems to agree.
“Apple (and Intel before it) has been working on this for a long time, but Qualcomm and MediaTek have significant leads in terms of 5G modem performance today, and that gap is likely growing,” he says.
“Still, Apple’s own modems could be ‘good enough’ for its non-flagship phones, iPads and hopefully, MacBooks. Apple will likely want to stick with Qualcomm’s modems longer for its premium products, especially on the phone side, where reception in fringe areas and in urban canyons is critical to the user experience.”
Hopefully, this means that when the new modem and new devices roll out users shouldn’t have to relive Apple’s past failures.