A Bloomberg report says that Apple won’t ship the first 5G-capable iPhones until late 2020, about a year after the rest of the industry.
This shouldn’t come as a surprise: Apple’s first iPhone ran on AT&T’s 2G network, EDGE, at a time when 3G was broadly available elsewhere. And Apple was late to the game with 4G/LTE, as well.
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Bloomberg suggests that Apple’s tardiness “may make it easier for rivals like Samsung to win over consumers” during 2019’s transition to 5G. But moving slowly has never hurt Apple in the past. The iPhone has consistently been the best-selling smartphone model despite routinely ignoring features and technologies that are available elsewhere.
That said, 5G is a much bigger upgrade than the previous transition to 4G/LTE, which was aided by HSPA (High Speed Packet Access) technologies that helped 3G networks boost speed over time. Moving to 5G will perhaps be more like the transition to 3G, with dramatically increased performance.
Market leader Qualcomm will likely make some 5G announcements at its Snapdragon Tech Summit this week. I spoke with that firm earlier this year and was told that 5G was transformational because it would enable mobile devices to access cloud data more quickly than doing so via local storage.
So we’ll see. But Apple’s slowness here doesn’t surprise me. It’s the way they’ve always done things.
PeterC
<p>its quite well noted that apple will be ditching intel modem chips and obviously have ditched/wont use Qualcomm, because theyre …… making their own modem chip too. Which will be shipping…. 2020.</p><p><br></p><p>Is this really a news story? </p>
dontbe evil
<p>sell new iPhone in 2019 and seel new iPhone 5g in 2020…they're marketing genius.</p><p><br></p>
Stooks
<blockquote><em><a href="#377268">In reply to MikeGalos:</a></em></blockquote><p><br></p><p>I think their timing on 4G was actually perfect. When they finally did release 4G after most had done already, maybe 5% of the network was 4G. </p><p><br></p><p>Honestly for what I do on a phone I could not even tell the difference from 3G to 4G. I did notice when they did turn off 2G/Edge or whatever it was called as my dead spots grew in our area especially for plain old calling.</p>
Stooks
<p>Android phone makers will add it way, way before it really means anything but will tout it like crazy. Youtube tech sites and traditional tech bloggers will eat it up and publish nonsense about it for a few years.</p><p><br></p><p>When Apple does release support for it it will be just about time to do so, maybe a tad early…..as in maybe 5-10% of a country like the US will have REAL 5G….whatever that pans out to be.</p><p><br></p><p>They did the same thing with 4G.</p>