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Thanks to a deluge of internal leaks from Apple, we have a remarkably solid idea of the three new iPhones that Apple will release Wednesday. The iPhone Xs, the iPhone Xs Max and the iPhone Xr (or Xc?) Have been largely previewed, and apart from the possibility of some new camera features and a dual SIM card, we have a good idea of what will appear.
However, one of the three new iPhones – most likely the iPhone Xs Max – will be compatible with 5G networks that are not yet launched.
To put it bluntly: it would go against everything Apple has done in the past and everything that makes sense to the company. Apple deliberately avoids new developments in LTE-Advanced technology, leading to iPhones that are obviously slower than their Android counterparts on wireless networks. It probably does so for reasons of cost, stability, but mostly because customers do not necessarily notice the difference in speed.
For 5G, these arguments are magnified. Although wireless carriers in the United States have stated that they will have 5G networks by the end of 2018, their reach will be extremely limited until early 2019 at the earliest. More importantly, 5G smartphones are just starting to be developed. Qualcomm, one of the leaders in manufacturing 5G chips for smartphones and tablets, has unveiled its 5G module only a few months ago.
The reason I bet my house on Apple does not publish 5G smartphone this year is this picture above. This is an announcement made today by Verizon and Qualcomm, which boasts the story of the realization of the "first end-to-end call with a smartphone form factor tester" on a marketed network. standardized. This is an important achievement, but just look at the device they call a "smartphone form factor". To be honest, he is huge. The reason for this is mainly the broadband spectrum physics used for 5G, which requires several large antennas to be placed around the device to obtain a coherent signal.
Given what we know about the next iPhones, it's a safe bet that the only phone designed with a 5G radio would be the iPhone Xs Max. This is going to be big – about 6.5 inches – and expensive, which would make it easier (and more profitable) to include a 5G radio. The iPhone Xr will be too cheap to include advanced technology, and there is not enough room to integrate 5G modules with the size of the existing iPhone X.
But even then, Apple is not going to make an oversized iPhone, ugly and expensive, just so that a handful of consumers in a handful of cities can get absurdly fast speeds to … browse Snapchat faster? The ultimate reason why Apple will fire the 5G is the same as the one it had in 2016 to get a MacBook Pro with USB-C ports, or up to the iPhone 7 for wireless charging. Apple has always waited for a compelling reason to introduce a new technology, and this philosophy applies doubly when it introduces a new technology that would compromise the existing product. That means no iPhone 5G this year, or maybe in 2019, and I bet no one will complain.
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