The iPhone 17 will reportedly get a new type of Wi-Fi chip

By Patrick Hearn Published October 31, 2024

A person using the Apple iPhone 16 Plus. — Andy Boxall / Digital Trends

By this time next year, Apple may have installed its own in-house Wi-Fi chips in all of its phones, or at least one of them.

According to Ming-Chi Kuo, a well-known analyst with a trusted record, Apple is working on its own Wi-Fi chips to replace the current ones from Broadcom, but there’s not a firm timeline on when they’ll arrive (via MacRumors). He says the iPhone 17 Pro might come equipped with this new chip, but other sources suggest it won’t get widespread adoption until the iPhone 18.

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Wi-Fi 7 isn’t anything new. All current iPhone 16 models are Wi-Fi 7 compatible, but those chips are supplied by Broadcom, a semiconductor company. By shifting the production of network chips to an in-house supplier, Apple can cut back on its production expenses (and potentially lower the cost of future devices).

Broadcom currently supplies over 300 million Wi-Fi+BT chips (hereafter referred to as Wi-Fi chips) per year to Apple. However, Apple will rapidly reduce its reliance on Broadcom. With new products in 2H25 (e.g., iPhone 17), Apple plans to use its own Wi-Fi chips, which will be…

— 郭明錤 (Ming-Chi Kuo) (@mingchikuo) October 31, 2024

The report also says that Apple producing its own chips could improve software integration, but Apple already operates within a garden walled with barbed-wire fences and automatic defense turrets. With the ongoing battle for better repairability, proprietary chips might be the opposite of what fans want.

Kuo said this new Wi-Fi chip would be manufactured using the 7nm process N7, a later evolution of the method used to produce the A13 bionic chip.

iPhone 16 Pro Max screen on — Nirave Gondhia / Digital Trends

If you aren’t familiar with Wi-Fi 7, here’s what you need to know. It provides higher bandwidth and allows users to transmit data on 2.4GHz, 5GHz, and 6GHz bands simultaneously, reaching peak speeds of more than 40 Gbps. That’s more than four times the power of Wi-Fi 6, and it’s faster than many hardwired connections.

If only the iPhone 17 Pro receives Apple’s first run of in-house chips, then it’s likely we’ll see them come to the entire iPhone 18 lineup. With Apple Intelligence on the rise, faster speeds and stable connectivity are more important than ever.

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