Reportedly, Apple has slammed the brakes on the development of another of its own CPUs in order to devote more resources to working on the A and M series of chips for future products. New information suggests that Apple is shifting its attention away from developing its own Wi-Fi processors. It hasn’t abandoned the plan, but we shouldn’t hold our breath for results either.
Analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, who posted the news on Twitter and Medium, claims that Apple has decided to keep using Broadcom as a supplier of Wi-Fi chips for its current and future devices. Wi-Fi modules for Apple’s Mac computers and iPhones have been supplied by Broadcom, a longtime Apple collaborator.
Work on a combined WiFi + Bluetooth remains ongoing (different than WiFi only chip work) https://t.co/2MM848LRiq
— Mark Gurman (@markgurman) January 26, 2023
While development on Apple’s Wi-Fi chip has ceased, it seems that a hybrid Wi-Fi/Bluetooth version is still in development. Mark Gurman of Bloomberg contributed his two cents to Kuo’s tweets and offered the aforementioned facts. It seems from this and Kuo’s assessment that Broadcom will continue to be Apple’s primary supplier of Wi-Fi chips for the foreseeable future.
Even if this is a setback, this isn’t the first time rumors have circulated about Apple needing to delay an internal component. It was rumored at the start of the month that the corporation had scrapped the iPhone SE 4 that was scheduled for release in 2024. Normally, the cancellation of a major product would be newsworthy in and of itself, but in this case, the fact that Apple planned to develop a new in-house baseband processor for this smartphone was a crucial factor.
According to reports, Apple planned to use this new chip in its cheaper iPhone models first before bringing it to its more expensive ones. But now that Apple has decided not to release an updated iPhone SE, Qualcomm will resume its role as Apple’s primary supplier of baseband processors, thus putting the project on hold. Despite Apple’s haste, upgrading to new hardware is fraught with peril, especially when working with the iPhone and Mac.
