The 2022 iPhones will likely have Apple made 5G modems

Apple purchased Intel’s modem business earlier this year for their 5G potential, and now a new report says the firm may want to have these modems in phones by 2022. For those keeping count, that’s just a little under two years if Apple wants to have phones that ship in fall 2022.

Fast Company notes this, pointing out the herculean nature of this task:

In fact, bringing a new modem to the finish line in two years is really pushing it, my source said. After all the design work is done, and the fabrication of the chips themselves is underway, an arduous testing and certification process still awaits.

Apple will have to put the modem through network optimization testing to make sure it plays nice with the carriers’ wireless networks. The modem must be tested to ensure compliance with global standards, and undergo another battery of tests to satisfy FCC requirements.

While Apple already uses Intel modems in its iPhones, the firm grew dissatisfied with the pace of the supplier. Intel similarly lost interest, finally agreeing to sell its mobile modem business to Apple and wash its hands off the whole thing.

Apple is known for wanting to build and design as many components of the iPhone as it can. If the firm can pull it off, its 5G modem for the iPhone 13 or foldable iPhone or whatever we’d be using by then could once again see it pull as far ahead of the pack as its current SOCs. For a company as new to modems as Apple, that ‘if’ is doing a lot of work.

Source: Fast Company, Via: iMore