Apple’s spending billions on an iPhone upgrade you won’t notice, but will definitely benefit from

Sometimes Apple likes to plan very far in advance. The Apple Intelligence that's launching with the iPhone 16 started with a small app called Siri that Apple bought way back in 2010 and the Neural Engine it introduced in 2017. The processor powering those iPhones started with Apple's purchase of chip design firm PA Semiconductor in 2008. And now it looks like Apple is making another long-term bet with an upgrade that won't appear in the iPhone 16, but could make a big difference to future iPhone models.

The upgrade is to the iPhone modem chip, which of course handles all your mobile data transmission. Apple currently uses modems from Qualcomm, but since 2018 Apple's relationship with Qualcomm has become more combative and the firm is keen to make its own modems. And according to a new report from Bloomberg it's in this for the long haul, spending billions on development that might not produce a product for several more years.

Why does Apple want to make its own modem?

There are several reasons. Money is one of them: Apple pays Qualcomm licensing fees, and has repeatedly claimed that it's paying too much. But taking the modem chip in-house could also enable Apple to make more compact, more efficient designs, and it could conceivably combine Wi-Fi and mobile data and then integrate its modem with its Apple Silicon chipset. If Apple is indeed moving to ever slimmer iPhones and folding iPhones too, the smaller the components the better. 

That sounds great. But actually delivering it is a really tough task, not least because Qualcomm's modems are already everywhere and have gone through many generations while Apple started from scratch. As Bloomberg points out, iPhone users are counted in their billions. That's a lot of users to migrate to a new modem, and if you get it wrong the fallout will make the iPhone 4 "antennagate" disaster look like a very minor drama indeed.