Apple to limit iPhone 7 Qualcomm modem Performance to be on par with the slower Intel ones

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Apple launched the new iPhone 7 and the iPhone 7 Plus, back in the month of August along with the Apple Watch series 2. Well, it wouldn’t be a typical Apple launch without any controversy or issues related to the device itself. And this year as well, it was reported that not the new iPhones have the same modems inside them. Few of the units came with the Qualcomm modem, while the others had Intel chips. Now when you talk about the performance, it was reported that Qualcomm modems performed better in comparison to the Intel ones.

While the difference in the performance is nothing significant and definitely not something which should bother most of the users, it is something worth noting though. As the end consumers, you have all the right to ask questions to the company related to this. But before you do that, there is something that you should be knowing. Apple has now decided to limit the performance of the Qualcomm modem to match the slower intel ones to make things fair overall.

As many people would say, this has nothing to do with the carriers whatsoever. “Apple chose to use different modems for leverage and redundancy, and carriers had no real say in that,” said Jan Dawson, an analyst at Jackdaw Research. “So it would be a little unfair if Apple allowed, say, Verizon and Sprint to say that their iPhone performs better than AT&T and T-Mobile’s.” It is a known fact that the Verizon and the Sprint variants of the new iPhones come with the faster Qualcomm modems. And upon testing the same, there is a slight difference in the performance indeed. Verizon and Sprint units use the Qualcomm X12 modem, while AT&T and T-Mobile use the Intel XMM 3360 modem.

The Qualcomm modem maxes out at speeds of up to 600 megabits per second, while the Intel modem’s max speed is around 450 megabits per second.This decision of limiting the performance on the Qualcomm modem variants makes a lot of sense from the user point of view. Marketing the same smartphone saying it is faster on Verizon or Sprint would be so unfair to the competing carriers and even the end users who have purchased from other carriers. And not just that, there are other factors to consider here as well like the power consumption etc. Ther are no reports regarding that however, it is highly possible since the modems are operating on different potential.

We believe that users who bought the Verizon or Sprint variants won’t see much difference in the speeds post this update. Hence, there shouldn’t be any issue here whatsoever. Stay tuned for more updates on this as we will update once we have more details.

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