Shahram Mokhtari, iFixit’s lead teardown engineer, tweeted photos of the iPhone 15 motherboard, which reveal something interesting: a Qualcomm Snapdragon X70 modem. This is the same 5G modem used in the iPhone 15 Pro.
What makes it interesting is that the iPhone 15 and 15 Plus use the chipsets from last year’s iPhone 14 Pro: the Apple A16 Bionic. However, those chipsets were paired with the older X65 modem. It is now A16 + X70 for Vanilla models and A17 + X70 for Pro.
This means that Apple didn’t just take a motherboard from the 14 Pro and stick it into the body of the iPhone 15, but there were some redesigns and upgrades under the hood. The X70 modem is more energy efficient than its predecessor and features a new AI processor for improved performance.
By the way, some court documents surfaced in 2020 during the Apple-Qualcomm legal battle, showing that the initial plan was to use a mix of X65 and X70 modems for the 2022 and 2023 iPhones. This was supposed to be the end, as Apple wanted to switch to internal modem.
That modem suffered several issues (which may be legal in nature), so plans to switch kept getting delayed. Earlier this year they were officially discontinued as Apple extended its Qualcomm deal through 2026, so the next three generations of iPhones will also use Snapdragon modems.
Start a new Thread