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Since Apple is also late with new iPhones due to delays due to the crown crisis, the company must now ensure that the new models inspire as many people as possible as quickly as possible. The significant year-end business with the new iPhones has shrunk from several months to a few weeks.
In particular, 5G technology should now succeed in turning iPhone stakeholders into iPhone buyers. This means that Californians are very late, with Android smartphones 5G is already standard equipment, at least for the upper middle class. However, Apple says: “There is 5G. And 5G on the iPhone.”
Not always the best solution
In fact, Apple’s new mobile phones have some special features to offer with the fast mobile standard of the future. According to Apple, the iPhones 12, 12 Mini, 12 Pro, and 12 Pro Max support more frequency bands used for 5G than any other smartphone. This is important because depending on the country and provider, other frequencies are used for 5G and, ideally, iPhones can also use 5G wherever there is 5G.
Unfortunately, in many areas there are still no 5G networks and even if there are, it may happen that you are worse off with 5G than with LTE. At least, this is the result of research by the rate comparison portal Verivox, which is certainly not applicable globally but is nonetheless exemplary. Its testers measured the network speed in 22 popular German tourist destinations and reached an average download speed of 375 megabits per second, regardless of whether they were connected via LTE or 5G.
Also, the available bandwidth decreases when LTE and 5G are “used in parallel in a cell tower.” On the island of Mainau, on Lake Constance, this means “that 5G customers surf only half as fast as 4G network users.”
The problem with battery life
While Apple is unlikely to have much influence on this problem, the company has found an at least theoretically clever solution to another weak point of 5G technology: namely, the high power consumption of 5G, which sometimes dramatically reduces the battery life of smartphones. According to computer magazine “Chip,” for example, Samsung’s Galaxy S20 Ultra with 5G only has 54 percent of the battery life that it handles on the LTE network.
So that the new iPhones do not suffer such an embarrassing lapse, they offer the so-called “Smart Data Mode”. If enabled, 5G only turns on when the iPhone really needs its possible bandwidth, for example when you want to download a large app or movie, which ideally only takes a few seconds. Once this is done, it switches back to power saving LTE. If you don’t want that, it could be the same people turning off the fuel-saving start-stop feature in the car, you don’t have to activate this mode.
By the way, the smart switch between LTE and 5G could also help providers make it less visible where there are gaps in 5G expansion, as you ideally won’t notice which network you are currently using.
Important for 5G, not 5G
Forrester analyst Thomas Husson also claims that “Apple will do more for 5G than 5G for new iPhones.” That would fit in with Apple’s typical approach of not being the first to use new technologies, but then making them so easy to use and so enticing to its customers that they dominate the market. A wireless charging feature, for example, had already been offered by others before Apple, but it was only when it became available on iPhones that it became popular on a large scale.
Now the same could happen with 5G: By incorporating high-speed mobile communications, the company will quickly become one of the most important players in this area. After all, with a market share of almost 60 percent in the US, the company is by far the market leader and the world’s third-largest smartphone maker. Combined with connecting iPhones via 5G to Apple TV + and Apple Music streaming services, Apple Arcade game service, and iCloud data storage service, the demand for 5G offerings could increase relatively speed.
The chicken and egg problem with the new nets would almost solve itself, because where there is demand, there is also usually a supply soon. With any luck, the new iPhones could ultimately become the killer app that gives the 5G expansion the boost it needs to finally take on remarkable forms.
