When the iPhone 16e arrived at iFixit HQ today, we immediately sent it in for some intense surgery. For the first time ever, our teardown day started with a little light microsoldering, taking off the new C1 modem to send to our partners for analysis.
The iPhone 16e, the new entry-level iPhone, already has its place marked in Apple’s history books. It is the first iPhone to use Apple’s own cellular modem chip, instead of packing one from Qualcomm.
This is a big deal for several reasons. Partly it’s because now Apple can finally control one of the most important parts of a smartphone. Partly it’s because—as we shall see—Apple hates Qualcomm. And partly it’s because it has taken Apple so long to manage to actually build the thing. Today we will take a look at Apple’s long and painful path to the C1.
Why Bother?
First, why even bother with making your own modem when you can buy one that works perfectly well already, and that you’ve been putting in your phones, very reliably, since forever?
A modem turns analog wireless signals from cell towers into digital signals your phone can understand. It was originally short for modulator/demodulator—and at a basic level, your phone modem is doing the same thing the noisy dial-up modems of the ‘90s did. But today’s cellular modems have a bunch of antennas and can transmit on many radio channels simultaneously. Modem technology has advanced rapidly, allowing chips to aggregate frequency bands from multiple carriers.
The iPhone 16 used the Qualcomm SDX71M modem, which boasted up to 26% faster 5G download speeds than the previous generation. It wasn’t, however, Qualcomm’s latest modem, the X75, and some people guessed that Apple picked a slightly older generation “to minimize the gap when their self-developed baseband is introduced.” Lots of folks watching closely correctly figured that the next iPhone modem would be an in-house Apple chip.
If you follow Apple, you’ll know that it likes to own the whole chain. This starts with it making both the hardware and the software for its platforms, and is the reason why it now makes its own ARM-based Apple Silicon chips, and why it runs its own App Stores with their own payment systems. It’s about control, and the power and flexibility this brings. Look at the struggles Microsoft has had trying to make people switch to Windows 11, or to convince software makers to use its latest features. Or look at how PC makers were stuck with hot, inefficient Intel x86 chips until Qualcomm’s latest ARM chips got good enough to run laptops.
Apple likes to have control of everything, and this means that the hardware works perfectly (in theory) with the software, and that it can add new features and push new OS updates when it wants. And this control also leads to things like the excellent battery life of M-series Macs, for example.
By designing its own modem chip, it will eventually be able to include that chip on the main system on a chip (SoC) in iPhones, iPads, and Macs, and presumably see falling costs, and much less power consumption. Apple is also rumored to introduce its own in-house Wi-Fi chips in the fall release of the iPhone 17 lineup.
But it might be the business side of things that really pushed Apple to make the C1. After all, Apple doesn’t manufacture its own displays, nor RAM nor SSDs, and yet these are just as essential to its products as the cellular modem. And Apple seems to have little problem partnering with TSMC to make its A-series and M-series chips. The problem here is Qualcomm itself.
Qualcomm, Apple, Fight!
In 2017, Apple sued Qualcomm for $1 billion, claiming that Qualcomm was charging way too much for patent licensing. Apple called this anti-competitive, because it was impossible to make a smartphone without them. It also accused Qualcomm of withholding $1 billion in payments owed as retribution for Apple’s role in a South Korean investigation into Qualcomm.
This legal fight dragged on for years, getting dirtier and dirtier. Qualcomm, for instance, tried to get some iPhone models banned in the US, and tried to do the same in Germany and China. In 2019, a US ITC judge recommended that several iPhone models should be barred from import.
This is hardly a healthy relationship. All the while, Apple was paying Qualcomm for every modem it put in an iPhone. In a 2019 settlement, Apple reportedly paid Qualcomm around $6 billion up front, with an agreement to pay $9 per iPhone sold in future.
All this time, Apple had been trying to escape Qualcomm’s tight—and expensive—hold on this key component. And finally, with the iPhone 16e, it looks like it has succeeded.
Getting Serious
When Apple wanted to make its own custom chips, it bought out chip designer PA Semi in 2008 (the year after the iPhone launch) for just $278 million. That acquisition led to the incredible M-series Mac and iPad chips of today.
When it decided to finally make its own cellular modems, Apple bought another company, only this one was much bigger. Apple purchased Intel’s smartphone modem division for $1 billion. This included around 2,200 Intel employees, and—possibly most importantly—over 17,000 wireless technology patents.
It’s one thing designing a cellular modem. It’s quite another to do that when you cannot use any technology or methods that have been patented by Qualcomm. One might also speculate that Qualcomm deliberately monkeyed with the 5G spec to make it impossible to reverse-engineer, ensuring that it could license its own patents to everyone. But that would just be speculation.
But even with all of Intel’s know-how, IP, and gear, Apple struggled to make a modem that could replace the Qualcomm-licensed designs, and do it efficiently enough to put in the iPhone. The iPhone is, after all, Apple’s money machine, and any new component has to be 100% perfect right out of the gate. It also has to be made at iPhone scale, which means tens of millions of units. That’s why this first iteration is in the 16e, the least important phone in the lineup, and one in which it won’t matter if the cellular performance isn’t up to snuff.
And consider this—even Intel, with decades of chip design and building experience, couldn’t manage this. Why did Apple think it could do better?
Harder Than It Looks
In 2011, Intel bought the wireless division of German chip maker Infineon, for $1.3 billion, and later bought another part of Infineon that had been spun off previously. Some iPhone 4 models used Infineon wireless chips, and later iPhone models (including the iPhone 7 and up to the iPhone 11) used Intel’s modems.
But the Intel versions just weren’t as good as the Qualcomm ones. Some models used both modems, depending on which carrier you purchased the phone for, sites ran stories on how to tell which modem your iPhone used. Why? Because the Qualcomm-equipped iPhones had faster LTE.
Then came 5G, and Intel just couldn’t keep up. It announced its 5G plans in 2017, and one year later, its 5G modem was still “the size of a fridge,” according to RC Wireless News’ Prakash Sangam. Based on the usual schedules for reducing a filing-cabinet-sized box of components to a single chip that could fit in a smart phone, it just wouldn’t be ready in time, and Apple was forced back to Qualcomm, despite all the bad blood between them.
Which is why it’s such a huge deal for Apple to have finally shipped the C1. The next step must surely be to put this in the flagship iPhone models, and the iPad. And once the C1 is incorporated into Apple’s A-series and M-series SoCs, it would seem crazy not to enable them in MacBooks, too. And as those integrated modems will be included on TSMC’s small-nanometer process, they should be more energy-efficient too.
For the user, the benefits so far seem to be better battery life, either because the C1 is so small that Apple can fit more battery into the 16e, or because it really is more efficient than the Qualcomm modems. We’ll know more when we tear one down. Otherwise, unless and until Apple brings cellular to the Mac, most of the benefits here are Apple’s.
Stay tuned—the iPhone 16e’s guts are splayed on our teardown table. The rest of our analysis is coming soon!
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