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Comment by chasingtheflow | Hacker News Reader

The radio is universal CDMA/GSM/LTE.

Kinda sorta. See the tech specs page[0] and the LTE compatibility page[1]. There are actually three different models. All three have 3G GSM/EDGE support. But they support different LTE bands. And only the CDMA model adds the CDMA frequencies.

> GSM model A1428: UMTS/HSPA+/DC-HSDPA (850, 900, 1900, 2100 MHz); GSM/EDGE (850, 900, 1800, 1900 MHz); LTE (Bands 4 and 17)

> CDMA model A1429: CDMA EV-DO Rev. A and Rev. B (800, 1900, 2100 MHz); UMTS/HSPA+/DC-HSDPA (850, 900, 1900, 2100 MHz); GSM/EDGE (850, 900, 1800, 1900 MHz); LTE (Bands 1, 3, 5, 13, 25)

> GSM model A1429: UMTS/HSPA+/DC-HSDPA (850, 900, 1900, 2100 MHz); GSM/EDGE (850, 900, 1800, 1900 MHz); LTE (Bands 1, 3, 5)

[0] https://www.apple.com/iphone/specs.html

[1] https://www.apple.com/iphone/LTE/

I didn't realize they had the single Qualcomm chip for CDMA/GSM back on the 4S too. That's a nice piece of tech.

That's what people in semiconductors do -- they try to take a bunch of features and package it in a single chip to reduce costs. There are chips out there with temperature, accelerometer, and proximity sensors packaged in a single unit. There was a time when an actual quartz crystal was needed as a resonator, and now those are replaced with mems technology so that one can package more into a single silicon chip.

I'm sure we can all remember the time when the cpu & gpu were separate chips.

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