Apple has been one of the tech giants that continuously enjoying its commercial success in the digital world - and one of its most successful inventions, the AirPods, is making a huge profit since hitting the store shelves in December 2016. But it looks like the company is delaying its iPhone support for 5G until 2020, which may not satisfy customers who have been iOS users since the release of the first iPhone in 2007.
Bloomberg reported that Apple decided to wait until 2020 before it will deploy iPhones that support the 5G network, according to its sources, who refused to be identified. The 5G mobile data speed will be introduced in 2019, which gives way to other tech giants like Samsung to prevail in earning more customers as soon as they launch their flagship handsets that will support 5G.
The 5G network speed will soon be deployed to China, the United States, and other known Apple markets by 2019, which will be a good time for the company to introduce iPhones that support the 5G mobile network speed. Apple thought that the new mobile speed and an iOS handset might experience issues such as intermittent coverage, which will cause more issues for customers not to go for new iPhones.
But this decision might be because of its continued feud with Qualcomm, the leader in 5G-enabled chips or modems. Qualcomm plans to develop 5G modems that are discrete from the system-on-a-chip (SoC), which comes with a smartphone's GPU, CPU, as well as the modem itself.
But unlike many Android devices, iPhones are already packed with discrete modems. Apple might have also thought that the transition to the 5G network might be too early, especially that its modem partner, Intel, is not yet prepared to move to the 5G speed.
However, Apple is known for not competing to a new network speed on its iPhones. For instance, when the tech giant introduced the first iPhones in 2007, the handset only supported 2G network wherein the 3G network was already available at that time although the iPhone 3G was released the following year.
Apple's iPhone 4S was also launched in 2011 supporting only 3G network when people were already taking pleasure in the 4G network. "Apple has always been a laggard in cellular technology," Mark Hung, an analyst at Gartner Inc. said. "They weren't impacted in the past, but 5G is going to be much easier to market. But if they wait beyond 2020, then I think they'll be impacted."
