After a fierce legal battle between Apple and Qualcomm, it would be expected to never both the names together anywhere else apart from business sections of newspapers. However, you can still see the two in a place you’d least expect to — the iPhone 8. That’s what iFixit’s official teardown of the iPhone 8 revealed last week.
After the guys at iFixit took out most of the components from an iPhone 8, they found the Qualcomm Snapdragon X16 Gigabit LTE modem sitting beside A11 Bionic chip. Further investigation of the Qualcomm chip revealed that the X16 inside the iPhone 8 comes without the four antennas required to drive the 4x4 MIMO component. This means that despite the modem’s capability to reach Gigabit speeds, the iPhone 8 will only reach up to 800Mbps max, which also means it’s not as fast some other Android flagships.
This is actually surprising that despite using the fastest mobile modem from Qualcomm, Apple has desperately limited the capabilities of the X16 modem. Faster bandwidths also result in better network reception in low network conditions such as in urban areas. Whatever the reason may be, we now know that the iPhone 8 is certainly not the fastest smartphone in terms of modem speeds.
