Here's why to avoid the iPhone 16e, get the iPhone Air… or, even better, wait for the iPhone 18 Pro

More often than not, we, the tech fans, are obsessed with chipsets (for the ultimate performance), batteries (10,000 mAh+ capacity, if you please!), super-bright displays or quad-camera setups with hundreds of millions of pixels and large apertures. That's fine and all, but at the end of the day, aren't we forgetting a phone's primary purpose? That's to keep us connected.

This is where modems come in – of what use would a blazing-fast processor be if your connection isn't particularly good?

Apple has gone to great lengths to cut its Qualcomm reliance over modems… and has largely succeeded, the latest Ookla findings show clearly.

A big upgrade

Back in 2025 when the iPhone 16e was launched, it arrived with the C1 modem under the hood. The C1 is Apple's creation, not Qualcomm's – and like almost all first-gen products, it had its fair share of shortcomings and hiccups. The C1 clearly lagged behind its Qualcomm counterparts.

Mere six months later, when the iPhone Air arrived (this happened in September 2025), it showed off the C1X – another Apple-made modem, but this time, the project was executed with greater success. Maybe Apple wasn't convinced about the C1X, because it equipped the iPhone 17, the iPhone 17 Pro and the iPhone 17 Pro Max with the Qualcomm X80 modem.

Ookla compared these and the findings show that the C1X has largely caught up with Qualcomm in terms of performance.



While Apple's C1X modem in the iPhone Air is not as powerful on paper as Qualcomm's X80 modem in the iPhone 17 Pro Max, in everyday use the difference is much smaller. Tests that examined the best, average, and worst network conditions show that the C1X is a big improvement over Apple's earlier C1 modem.

The median results represent what most people experience daily, such as normal network congestion and average signal strength. The improvement was especially noticeable in places like the US, UAE, Saudi Arabia, China, Sweden, Singapore, and Japan, where the modem handles mid-band 5G more efficiently during busy hours. However, the C1X showed little or no improvement over the C1 in Brazil, India, and Malaysia. This likely happens because those markets rely more on low-band 5G or have heavier network congestion, which limits the modem's advantages.

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