Apple No Longer Developing its Own WiFi Chips Says Kuo

Ming-Chi Kuo has today claimed on Twitter that Apple is no longer working on its own WiFi chips, leaving Broadcom as the biggest winner of the iPhone 15’s upgrade to WiFi 6E.

Iphone 15 conmcept

According to the veteran Apple analyst, Broadcom will be the leading beneficiary of the WiFi industry-standard upgrade to Wi-Fi 6E/7 with higher ASP.

“My latest semiconductor industry survey indicates that Apple has halted the development of its own Wi-Fi chip for a while,” Kuo writes in a Medium post.

He continues that Apple’s previous development for WiFi solution was the WiFi-only chip and not the WiFi+Bluetooth combo chip.

Responding to Kuo’s, Mark Gurman tweeted that Apple is, however, still developing a combined WiFi + Bluetooth chip, which is different from the WiFi-only chip.

Kuo continues that developing a WiFi + Bluetooth combo chip is more challenging than just a Wi-Fi-only chip.

Since most of Apple’s products use the combo chip, it would be even more challenging to replace Broadcom’s combo chips with its own if Apple decides to do so.

In the next 2–3 years, Wi-Fi chips will usher in critical Wi-Fi 6E/7 upgrades. It’s riskier for Apple to use its own Wi-Fi chips aggressively when the industry standard markedly changes.

The analyst concludes by saying that investors should not be worried about Apple’s own WiFi chip affecting Broadcom’s WiFi chip business in the near future.

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