Apple has been working to bring its own 5G modem to the iPhone for years, and its struggles to do exactly that are among one of Silicon Valley's worst-kept secrets at this point. But a new report suggests that Apple intends to look beyond 5G sooner rather than later, leaning into future 6G connectivity long before it's ever likely to put the advanced networking feature into a future iPhone.
Apple has been working to design its own 5G modem hardware ever since it bought Intel's modem business back in 2019. It paid a cool billion dollars to bring Intel's know-how under its wring, but to date, it's struggled to turn any of that promise into a real piece of silicon. Reports have suggested that Apple has found designing a modem much more difficult than coming up with its own system-on-chip (SoC) designs for the iPhone, iPad, and Mac, not to mention the Apple TV and the Apple Watch. But signs are already clear that Apple is keen to push ahead, even going so far as to jump beyond 5G even before it's been able to wrangle that technology completely.
