Now the iPhone 17 series and iPhone Air have launched, more details have come to light about what makes them tick. I talked to Kaiann Drance, Apple’s Vice President of iPhone Marketing, Tim Millay, Vice President of Platform Architecture, and Arun Mathias, Vice President of Wireless Software Technologies.
They were eager to tell me how the new A19 Pro chip, found in the iPhone 17 Pro, iPhone 17 Pro Max and iPhone Air, along with the N1 wireless networking chip and the C1X cellular modem system — the latest Apple Silicon, in other words — enables the performance, battery and design in the latest products.
If that last one, design, is a puzzler, the point is this: a phone as thin as the iPhone Air needs what Apple is describing as its “most power-efficient design,” to be able to look like that and still have great performance.
At Apple, Tim Millay explained, “We build chips not to sell chips but to enhance and enable our products, which is great. I’ve been building chips for 35 plus years and what goes into that is usually when you work on chips, you really don’t know what the product is, so you’re trying to guess to make the right capabilities, right features. However, at a place like Apple, we have the advantage of being able to know exactly what the product is that the chip will be for.”
He went on, “With A19 Pro, we were targeting this beautiful, thin and light product, iPhone Air. We had a sneak peek early enough to make sure that we put the right capabilities into A19 Pro to make sure it lined up and intercepted the Air’s needs.”
“At the same time,” Drance commented, “we also knew that we were going to have this amazing new Pro system, with enhanced thermal design. So, you have these two targets that are sitting at very different places in the physical design space.”
“The N1 wireless networking chip,” Mathias said, “really is about truly delivering better experiences. With hotspots, for instance, the N1 solution can handle more clients, so AirDrop is able to handle simultaneous use cases: you might be working in the cloud as well as airdropping something to someone who might be uploading photos. It’s about optimizing the base technology for the types of things that users do. And the C1X modem is one of these critical technologies and innovations that made iPhone Air possible and it really comes down to energy efficiency.”
The C1 modem was introduced in early 2025 with the iPhone 16E, and “Now we have a significant boost in performance for the C1X, essentially doubling the speed that a user can get with C1, and if you compare it against the modem that’s in iPhone 16 Pro, it’s faster for all the same technologies, cellular technologies, but this is all done while being significantly more energy efficient,” Mathias said.
Millay added, “One of the advantages of having Apple Silicon is that now we have this robust toolkit where we can now go figure out what are the dials to turn so that we can enable the right products in the future for us as well.”
So, how about the tensions that arise when there are differences between engineers and designers, I wondered.
“In my early career, silicon was the beginning of everything: you start with the chip and then somebody designs a motherboard, somebody builds a box with big fans and then software comes along,” Millay explained.
“At Apple, we start with a work of art that the designers conceive of and hand to mechanical engineers to build. That gets passed on to folks in the electrical engineering team and they figure out how to put electronics in it and then the chip people are told ‘You get this much space and good luck.’ And then the software people come in and say, ‘By the way we want it twice as fast and half the power.’ You can imagine this introduces some constructive tension. It’s the tension that keeps a tent from collapsing. It’s through that constructive tension that we’re forced to innovate because we like to say that you don’t go back to the design team and tell them that something’s not possible unless you’ve gone and proven that, through laws of physics. We love those constraints,” he went on.
“And we think like that because of having a very visceral understanding of what we want to accomplish, what we want the customer to feel when they pick up this phone, how fast do we want it to be, how we want the performance to be under extreme gaming loads and things like that,” Drance added. “Tim speaks about giving the team clarity as to what we have to do and it makes the team look outside the box and innovate. So, we’ll build custom components. In iPhone Air, the USB port didn’t fit so we 3D titanium printed a new one that could fit inside the thinner profile.”
The new C1X modem launched just six months after C1 but that doesn’t mean that’s all the time it took: “We focused primarily between C1 and C1X on optimizing the firmware, software, and some of the other hardware components to try and bring about this additional boost in performance that we needed and that’s why we were able to deliver it in this time frame,” Mathias said.
“The other part of the answer is that it isn’t the case, that six months ago, the team began working on C1X: our roadmaps are multi-year journeys,” Millay added.
Of course, building its own modems is a new venture for Apple. It still buys modems from Qualcomm, for the iPhone 17 Pro, for instance. What’s the balance between buying and building your own?
Millay explains: “I work for Johnny Srouji, who runs the hardware technologies team. And his primary focus is, we don’t need to go build something that we can buy if it meets the needs of the product. Let’s focus on the things the product needs. But when we do find an opportunity, we’re fearless.”