Apple's new iPhone 16e sports the company's first in-house 5G modem, made on TSMC 4nm and 7nm

Apple's new budget-focused iPhone 16e was announced earlier this year, packing the company's first in-house 5G modem called the Apple C1.

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Apple's new C1 modem is the most power-efficient baseband chip inside of an iPhone according to the company, with the new in-house 5G modem seeing a combination of TSMC 4nm and 7nm process nodes. The new Apple C1 modem is fabbed on TSMC's newer 4nm process node, while the transceiver is made on TSMC's last-gen 7nm node.

The new iPhone 16e costs just $599 with the new Apple C1 subsystem inside, with this subsystem containing key components including the processor and memory. Apple's new iPhone 16e features the same A18 processor as the rest of the iPhone 16 family, and has the best battery life of all of the 6.1-inch iPhones thanks to its new C1 subsystem.

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Kaiann Drance, Apple's vice president of iPhone product marketing told Reuters that the iPhone 16e will also sport Apple's latest artificial intelligence features (because that's been going so well, more on that in the links above).

Johny Srouji, Apple's senior vice president of hardware technologies said in an interview at one of Apple's silicon labs in Sunnyvale, California: "We build a platform for generations. C1 is the start, and we're going to keep improving that technology each generation, so that it becomes a platform for us that will be used to truly differentiate this technology for our products".

Apple's in-house modem inside of the iPhone helps the company with its ecosystem, as the new C1 chips have a custom GPS system with satellite connectivity for when iPhone users aren't near a cellular service. In these scenarios, iPhone 16e users will lack some features, as there will be no way to connect to millimeter wave 5G networks.

Qualcomm is the king of millimeter wave technology, with Apple using its modems inside of the iPhone... but the new C1 subsystem is a first (big) step away from the US chipmaker, and into using in-house solutions. Apple executives declined to comment when we'll see the company having the technology to shift away from Qualcomm 5G modems.

However, Qualcomm executives have told investors that the company expects its share of Apple modems to drop from its current 100% (you can now see why Apple is moving to an in-house 5G modem) to 20% by 2026. Qualcomm still has a technology licensing agreement with Apple that will be in place until at least 2027.