The first report of a hardware failure affecting Apple’s new in-house developed C1X 5G modem in an iPhone Air has surfaced online. The report marks the first time we’ve heard of any real-world issues involving the Cupertino firm’s in-house baseband tech.
The iPhone Air is the first iPhone model to use Apple’s internally designed C1X 5G modem, which replaced the Qualcomm X75 modem used in the entire iPhone 16 lineup. Apple has been working to develop its own wireless modem chipsets to reduce its reliance on Qualcomm and its expensive modem licensing and purchasing supplies.
Now, Wccftech reports that a support thread on Reddit where the user “itstheskylion” described waking up to find the device had completely lost cellular reception.
So I woke up this morning and saw no cellular network on my iPhone Air. Checking the network settings led to this. Phone has been in case since day one and has no physical damage.
The user claims multiple troubleshooting steps were attempted, including restarting the device, a soft reset, and a reset of the Air’s network settings, but nothing restored cellular connectivity. The user says they use a dual-SIM configuration with two different carriers, and neither connection functioned, indicating the issue was not connected to a carrier outage or network disruption.
While such failures are uncommon in modern connected devices, large scale production can introduce a small percentage of faulty units. When an Apple device shows an issue like this, the company has usually been quite good about repairing oir replacing the faulty device.
At this point, we don’t know if this iPhone Air’s connectivity issues are a fluke, or an indicator of future connectivity issues for the C1X modem.
