HAWAII—Apple and Qualcomm are working on launching a 5G iPhone "as fast as we can," Qualcomm President Cristiano Amon confirmed today at Qualcomm's Snapdragon Tech Summit.
Amon broke down some new details on the two companies' "multi-year" licensing agreement. While the first 5G iPhone will include Qualcomm modems, it may not implement all of Qualcomm's RF front end, which appeared to me to be a decision intended to make sure the phone gets out on time.
"Priority number one of this relationship with Apple is how to launch their phone as fast as we can. That's the priority," he said.
Apple's iPhone development cycles are long enough that when the two companies agreed to bury the hatchet last April, it may already have been too late to re-invent the 5G iPhone's radio path to integrate Qualcomm's RF front end.
"We have a multi-year agreement with [Apple.] It's ... multi-year for our Snapdragon modem. We're setting no expectations on front end, especially because we engaged it very late," Amon said.
Take a moment to notice that Amon is saying Apple locked down some of the 5G iPhone's radio features 18 months before the phone is anticipated to come out in September 2020.
"We re-engaged probably later than both of us would like, and I think we've been working together to try to get as much as possible done ... so that we can actually launch a phone on schedule with 5G," Amon said.
In the 5G era, the RF front end—a thicket of antennas, signal tuners, and power amplifiers—has become newly important as a way of tuning and squeezing more signal out of difficult networks. Qualcomm calls its new Snapdragon a "modem-RF system," strongly suggesting that Qualcomm's own RF front-end components be used with its modems to get the best signal.
Apple has always been a mix-and-match customer with Qualcomm, mixing Qualcomm modems with Avago and Skyworks front-end components in the iPhone 7, for instance. But Apple switched to Intel modems at just about the point when Qualcomm started making its own RF front ends, and the modem maker is now arguing that its envelope-tracking and signal-tuning capabilities make a real difference in 5G performance.
Apple will probably have to take some Qualcomm front-end components, because right now Qualcomm makes the only millimeter-wave antenna modules that work on Verizon and AT&T's 5G networks. But it may use other elements of the radio path from other manufacturers that were already set when it expected to use Intel's now-cancelled 5G modem. We'll have to see if they perform as well as Qualcomm's.
That said, Apple's phones haven't historically been the greatest radio performers, and it hasn't mattered at all for their sales. The Intel modems Apple has been using have typically been behind the latest Qualcomm modems in terms of LTE speed and signal strength, but Apple fans haven't really noticed.
"We're very happy with the progress we're making, and I expect that they're going to have a great device," Amon said.
Editor's Note: Amon contacted us after the publication of this story to further clarify his quotes.
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