Source: Apple is not happy with the QTM 525 mm-wave antenna module Qualcomm is offering for this year's 5G iPhones and is trying to design its own antenna
In a year where the 5G radio will be the new iPhone's spotlight feature, Apple has decided to design the phone's antenna itself.
Context & Ripple Effects
The antenna dispute is one thread in a longer unraveling of the Apple–Qualcomm relationship. In 2019, Apple settled with Qualcomm only because it feared Intel could not supply 5G modems alone — dependence it accepted reluctantly. Qualcomm had set the technical template two years earlier when it unveiled its first mmWave and sub-6GHz antenna modules, making the QTM 525 the default path to millimeter-wave 5G.
Apple's response now is to take the antenna in-house rather than accept Qualcomm's module, and the related coverage shows where that leads: TSMC is lined up to mass-produce 4nm 5G modem chips and Apple has since spent billions building its own modem. The antenna is the visible edge of a broader effort to replace Qualcomm silicon across the radio chain.
First-order effects
- Apple gains control of the antenna design for the 2020 5G iPhones, whose mmWave radio is the headline feature — but inherits the engineering risk that Qualcomm's validated QTM 525 module was designed to absorb.
Second-order effects
- Qualcomm loses component-level content on its largest smartphone customer even while remaining its modem supplier, weakening the attach economics of its antenna-plus-modem bundle.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — antenna first, then an in-house modem built on TSMC process nodes — Apple internalizes the entire iPhone radio stack, leaving Qualcomm dependent on Android OEMs for the revenue the iPhone once guaranteed.
The trend: Apple is systematically internalizing the iPhone's radio hardware, moving from Qualcomm's integrated antenna-and-modem modules toward its own TSMC-built components.