Hi folks, I have good news. After the past couple of months of feeling cheated by Apple for misrepresenting and miscommunicating the Wi-Fi 7 specs of the iPhone 16 series right off the bat when they launched the iPhone 16 series, and motivating many like me to upgrade to iPhone 16 Pro Max from the iPhone 15 Pro Max, and then belatedly knowing about Apple’s capping of the Wi-Fi 7 channel bandwidth at 160MHz, I thought of a way to find out whether the issue is a hardware or a software one, because as we know, if the issue is a hardware one, no software update can resolve it.
1. Comparing the WiFi + Bluetooth specs of the iPhone 15 and iPhone 16 Pro Max (Apple publicly specifies these):
iPhone 15 Pro Max: Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3
iPhone 16 Pro Max: Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.3
2. Guesstimating which Qualcomm® WiFi + Bluetooth + 5G chipset is on the iPhones (unofficially it is known that Apple uses Qualcomm® chipsets for WiFi + Bluetooth + 5G, till it can officially releases its own):
iPhone 15 Pro Max: Wi‑Fi 6E (802.11ax) with 2x2 MIMO and Bluetooth 5.3 -> Qualcomm® SNAPDRAGON® 8+ GEN 1 with X65 modem and FastConnect™ 6900, providing max. Channel Bandwidth of 160MHz (see Channel Bandwidth spec at
https://tinyurl.com/3f6382yt)
iPhone 16 Pro Max: Wi‑Fi 7 (802.11be) with 2x2 MIMO and Bluetooth 5.3 -> Qualcomm® SNAPDRAGON® 8 GEN 2 with X70 modem and FastConnect™ 7800, providing max. Channel Bandwidth of 320MHz (see Channel Bandwidth spec at
https://tinyurl.com/3cck5m82)
Conclusion: Apple’s capping of the Wi-Fi 7 channel bandwidth at 160MHz is a software one. Let’s rejoice, folks. We can hope for a software update soon, and if we want to really make it happen, we should start demanding it, because they owe it to us. If their reason for capping off the channel bandwidth is performance, shouldn’t we be the ones to decide what channel bandwidth we want to use?! We can always configure our Wi-Fi 7 routers for that. Apple should leave it to us, not decide for us. We have paid good money to use the specs that iPhones come with.