iPhone 16 will have 5G modem made by Apple, says Qualcomm CEO

The iPhone 16, expected to be released in 2024, could have a 5G modem developed by Apple, according to Cristiano Amon, CEO of Qualcomm, which currently supplies 5G modems for all of the company’s devices, including the Apple Watch and iPad. The executive talked about the negotiations with Apple, in an interview for the American channel CNBC.

Apple has been planning to end its partnership with Qualcomm for several years. At the Investor Day in November 2021, Amon had said that the company would no longer supply the iPhone modem that will be released this year. Apple relented and decided to continue the partnership for another year.

“We are not making plans for 2024. I believe we will not supply the modem in 2024, but they are the ones who make the decision,” said the CEO. “If they need us, they know where to find us,” he said on a panel at Mobile World Congress 2023.

Since 2019, when it bought Intel’s smartphone modem division, Apple has been developing its own 5G chip. The deal cost the company R$1 billion, which took over the vertical’s 2,200 employees.

smartphone innovation

In the interview, Amon stated that the smartphone market continues to innovate “at full speed”, with new formats such as folding, flipping and unprecedented use cases. “There is a good roadmap for innovation,” the CEO said, listing the possibility of embedding artificial intelligence’s large language models (LLM) into smartphone chips.

MArKet

For him, the contraction of the smartphone market in 2022 was due to three factors: macroeconomic conditions, such as global inflation; producer inventory adjustment; and closing the Chinese market. He expects that by 2023, at least two of these factors will no longer be an obstacle to market growth.

“Perhaps there is potential for improvement in the second half. [do ano]. In general, more basic handsets are more sensitive to price, which rises and falls according to economic activity,” he said.