Apple's in-house C1X 5G modem in iPhone Air, not as good as Qualcomm 5G inside 17 Pro, Pro Max

Apple launched its new iPhone Air smartphone last week, with the new ultra-thin iPhone featuring the company's new in-house C1X 5G modem on the custom A19 Pro chip inside.

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The new A19 Pro chips have introduced a massive architecture change with neural accelerators on each of the GPU cores to boost compute power, alongside using its N1 wireless processor and in-house second-gen C1X 5G modem. Apple vice president of platform architecture, Tim Millet, said "that's where the magic is. When we have control, we are able to do things beyond what we can do by buying a merchant silicon part".

Apple has been solely using Qualcomm 4G and 5G modems on its iPhones since 2020, but earlier this year Apple announced its first-gen C1 5G modem for the budget iPhone 16e. Qualcomm still provides its 5G modems to Apple for its new iPhone 17, iPhone 17 Pro, and iPhone 17 Pro Max but the iPhone Air uses Apple's second-gen C1X 5G modem inside of the A19 Pro... all in-house chips.

However, even the prowess of the C1X 5G modem being "up to twice as fast" as the C1 and "uses 30% less energy" than the Qualcomm modem in the iPhone 16 Pro, explained Apple vice president of wireless software technologies and ecosystems to CNBC.

Ben Bajarin, CEO of Creative Strategies, a technology research and consulting firm, said: "It may not be as good as Qualcomm's yet, in terms of just overall throughput and performance, but they can control it and they can make it run at lower power. So you're going to get better battery life".

Apple's new iPhone Air isn't the flagship smartphone in its new iPhone 17 Pro Max, which has higher 5G speeds but most people are sitting on wireless, and if they've got super-fast internet at home then that is the speed they'll enjoy most of the time. Not many people need or want gigabit speeds using 5G when they're out, so the new iPhone Air is a nice little experiment to see how its new in-house C1X modem handles things.