Last week, Apple unveiled its first proprietary cellular modem, the C1, along with the announcement of the not-so-budget iPhone 16e, and while the company didn’t go into too much detail, it reportedly has big plans for future iterations. According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman,”Apple intends to eventually integrate a modem component into the main processor.” Integrating the modem into the main processor could have power and cost advantages, but it’s still a long way off. According to Gurman, we are likely to see the C2 and C3 without it first, which the company is already testing, and the integrated design will appear no earlier than “2028.”
During the presentation, Apple called the new C1 modem “the most energy-efficient modem in the iPhone”. The $599 iPhone 16e also has an A18 chip (but with four GPU cores) and supports Apple Intelligence, even if that’s not what people really wanted from it.
