It's always good to confirm what you suspected all along. In this case, iFixit's teardown of the iPhone 13 Pro shows that the iPhone 13 line has Qualcomm's X60 modem, the same as in other flagship phones such as the Samsung Galaxy S21 series.
This is not weird. This is what we expected. But Apple always refuses to give details about its modems, so it's nice to have it confirmed.
The iFixit teardown has a lot of goodies in it. But we will focus here on the radio chips. They've identified inside:
- Qualcomm X60 modems and SDR868 5G RF transceiver
- Qualcomm and Qorvo envelope trackers
- Broadcom and Skyworks front-end modules
They don't mention it, but Apple makes its own antenna modules.
Qualcomm and Apple have had a complex frenemy relationship for years. Apple used Qualcomm modems for a while, then switched to Intel and sued Qualcomm for $1 billion, then settled the lawsuit and signed a deal to use Qualcomm parts, all while it tries to develop its own modems using the remnants of Intel's modem business to potentially get free of Qualcomm.
The upshot of this all for now is that Apple continues to mix and match radio components from different suppliers. In theory, that would make iPhone 5G performance different from phones using Qualcomm's vaunted soup-to-nuts RF front-end solution. So far, I haven't been able to see a noticeable consistent difference in reception strength, but maybe more truths will come out as iPhone 13 units get into the marketplace.