Track Hyper | Apple hardware expert Jony Ive finally wins

Author: Zhou Yuan / Wall Street News

Apple's self-developed 5G modem (baseband) is about to be launched.

Recent market news indicates that Apple plans to launch its self-developed baseband chips starting in 2025, replacing the 5G baseband chips supplied by Qualcomm.

This news was also confirmed by Wall Street News in early October through the supply chain.

The modem (baseband) primarily allows devices to connect to mobile signal towers, enabling phone calls and internet connectivity.

Due to the inferior performance of Apple's first-generation 5G baseband chip, it is difficult for Apple to immediately sever ties with Qualcomm. The market expects that Apple will need about three years to fully replace Qualcomm.

Once Apple achieves the replacement of Qualcomm's baseband chips in three years, what will be the impact on Qualcomm's revenue?

Qualcomm did not directly list the financial data of Apple's procurement of its baseband chips in its financial report. According to data compiled by overseas institutions, more than 20% of Qualcomm's revenue comes from this iPhone manufacturer, primarily concentrated in modems. After the news of Apple's related plans emerged last Friday in Eastern Time, Qualcomm's stock price fell by 2% to an intraday low, but rebounded to a slight decline of 0.55% by the close.

In fact, for Qualcomm, Apple's launch of its self-developed 5G baseband chip will indeed have a certain negative impact on its performance, but Apple will still and must continue to pay Qualcomm for 5G baseband patent fees. This is a hurdle that any company with baseband communication chips cannot bypass.

Apple's self-developed 5G baseband chip, internally codenamed "Sinope," has been in development for five years and will debut in the new iPhone SE (i.e., 4) launching in spring 2025. Additionally, this "treasure" of Apple will also be featured in the iPhone 17 Air and some lower-end iPad devices.

The product launching in 2025 is an entry-level product with limited performance, positioned in the mid-range, and does not support 5G millimeter-wave functionality, with channel bundling limited to four carriers (Qualcomm supports six or more). Reports suggest that Apple will integrate it with the application processor (AP) to create a system on chip (SoC), allowing the iPhone SE 4 to achieve a thinner and lighter body, with strong satellite connectivity capabilities.

In terms of user experience, the signal issues faced by Apple will be significantly improved after the SoC is equipped with Apple's self-developed 5G baseband chip.

Currently, because Apple uses an external Qualcomm 5G modem, it cannot fully utilize superior signal reception and decoding performance, leading to occasional instability in signal on the application side.

Although the performance of Apple's first-generation self-developed 5G baseband chip is not as good as current Qualcomm products, its core components will play an important role in Apple's thinnest smartphone product ever (internally codenamed D23) set to launch in 2025.

As a side note, in 2025, "slim" will become a key product keyword for mainstream high-end flagships.

Looking ahead to the near future, this will lay the design foundation for Apple's launch of foldable screens According to Apple's plan, an iterative version of its self-developed 5G modem will be launched in 2026 (with a download speed of up to 6Gbps, supporting 5G millimeter waves) for higher-end products (such as the iPhone 18 Pro). By 2027, the third-generation product (codenamed Prometheus) will be able to fully replace Qualcomm-related products.

The leader of Apple's hardware technology team is Senior Vice President Johny Srouji (1964-), who joined Apple in 2008 and was promoted to Senior Vice President in 2015. He led the development of the renowned A4 (Apple's first self-developed chip system, which opened the door to mobile internet and truly changed the world), A7 (the world's first 64-bit smartphone chip), and M1.

Johny is primarily responsible for overseeing groundbreaking custom silicon and hardware technology, including batteries, application processors, storage controllers, sensor silicon, display silicon, and other chipsets across Apple's entire product line.

Born in Haifa, Israel, Johny Srouji, like Jobs, is also of Arab descent, with family roots tracing back to Lebanon.

Johny obtained a master's degree in computer science from the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology. After graduating, Srouji joined the Israeli IBM research lab and then the Intel Israel design center before joining Apple in March 2008. In 2015, Johny was promoted to Senior Vice President of Hardware Technology at Apple.

Notably, there are reports that Johny is a potential candidate for the next CEO of Intel, having been included in the pool of candidates being considered by headhunting firms.

Such an impressive figure, Johny led his team in tackling modem development, which took a full six years. Apple hardware technology head Johny Srouji once stated that "the development process of the modem is extremely difficult."

On July 26, 2019, Apple announced that it would acquire Intel's smartphone modem business. This was Apple's second-largest acquisition deal in its history.

Under the agreement, Apple will acquire approximately 2,200 Intel employees, along with related intellectual property, equipment, and leases. The deal is valued at $1 billion, and Apple will use this to continue advancing its self-developed 5G modem chip technology.

Through this acquisition, Apple gained over 17,000 wireless technology patents, covering areas from cellular standard protocols to modem architecture and modem operations.

If the first self-developed 5G baseband chip can be launched as scheduled in 2025, then Johny's efforts to promote this work on a large scale since 2019 will finally achieve initial success (2019-2025).

Currently, the supply-demand relationship between Apple and Qualcomm regarding 5G baseband chips is set to expire in February 2027.

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