Apple has reportedly halted plans to move the iPhone to its own in-house Wi-Fi chip in favour of moving resources to work on designing ever-faster CPUs.Applehad been reportedly working onditching Broadcomas soon as 2024 or 2025, but that now looks highly unlikely according to a new report that suggests those plans have been shelved.Analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, posting toMedium, says that “Apple has halted the development of its own Wi-Fi chip for a while.” That would suggest that any thoughts of even a 2025 transition away from Broadcom is now unlikely.The Wi-Fi chip was intended to give Apple more control over the silicon that goes into its products, with the company also keen to integrate Bluetooth connectivity onto the same chip. Rumours of plans to bring the cellular modem on board have also popped up of late. That now all appears to have been thrown into chaos.
“The slowdown of processor upgrades is unfavorable to the sales of end products,” Kuo says when explaining why Apple has chosen to progress its developing of CPUs to the detriment of its Wi-Fi plans. The change is “to ensure that the world’s most advanced 3nm processors can enter mass production smoothly in 2023–2025, and the performance upgrade and power consumption improvement can significantly improve vs. predecessors, Apple has devoted most of its IC design resources to the development of processors,” Kuo says.
It’s also thought that Apple’s plans to ditch Qualcomm and use in-house 5G modems have also suffered due to “insufficient development resources.”
Apple has gone from having no skin in the silicon game a few years ago to being one of the biggest players thanks to super-fast M1 and M2-series chips. The A-series iPhone and iPad chips have also proven to be more capable than the majority of the competition, but the transition to a 3nm manufacturing process is seen as the next thing that will push Apple’s silicon to the next level - hence the decision to allocate resources to ensure that happens.
