A look at Apple's quest to build key device components in-house, including a cellular modem and other wireless chips, displays, batteries, and camera sensors
This week, we go inside Apple's quest to replace every major part of the iPhone with an in-house design.
Context & Ripple Effects
Apple’s component push builds on its decision to bring modem engineering under Johny Srouji’s hardware technologies group in an earlier modem-team reorganization. By 2020, the effort had progressed to work on an Apple-designed cellular modem, making the broader list of targeted components a continuation rather than a one-off project.
The modem remains the clearest test case: later coverage describes a staged path toward deployment in niche models before wider rollout. That sequencing underscores the difference between designing a component internally and replacing an established supplier at iPhone scale.
First-order effects
- Apple is extending its internal design agenda beyond application processors to modem, wireless, display, battery, and camera-sensor categories, concentrating more component roadmaps inside its hardware organization.
- Incumbent component suppliers face a less certain long-term role in the iPhone where Apple can develop a viable alternative, even though the report does not establish that any specific supplier has already been displaced.
Second-order effects
- Apple gains more opportunity to coordinate component specifications with iPhone hardware and software; it also assumes more of the engineering, validation, and production-risk burden previously carried by specialists.
- Specialist suppliers will have added incentive to differentiate on manufacturing execution, performance, and cost in categories Apple targets, while Apple’s manufacturing partners must support a product with more Apple-defined parts.
Third-order effects
- If Apple can move internal designs from development into volume products, control of the smartphone value chain shifts further from merchant component vendors toward vertically integrated device makers.
- The likely enduring constraint is execution: the later modem coverage’s staged rollout suggests that high-volume radios and other complex components are difficult to internalize quickly, preserving a role for external supply even as Apple expands design control.
The trend: This is part of a broader vertical-integration trend in which major device makers seek to own more of the silicon and component roadmaps that differentiate their products.