On Tuesday Apple’s new iPhone hits the stores powered by super-fast 5G.

Apple CEO Tim Cook hopes it will be the biggest game-changer for Apple’s hardware business in years.

The new iPhones will be 5G equipped, which the firm hopes will trigger a wave of upgrades from Apple’s global audience of nearly one billion iPhone users.

Apple think 18 per cent of iPhone users will trade up in the next 12 months – that is 180m new iPhones sold.

If Apple can persuade Android users to switch to 5G iPhones too, Apple could hit a bonanza: 240m iPhone sold would lead to a 50% gain in valuation to $170 a share which would equal a market cap of three trillion dollars. A lot is at stake, making this release  the most significant Apple event in years.

Both Huawei and Samsung released their 5G phones a year ago but uptake has not fast partly because the US has been slow to build 5G infrastructure.

In countries with a mature 5G infrastructure download times are considerably faster than 4G. In the UK download times using 5G are six times faster than 4G and four times faster than Wifi because of new modem and bandwidth technologies.

The new 5G iPhone will be more expensive for Apple to produce and so the firm’s famously fat profit margin may take up to a 10% hit. To compensate, it seems likely Apple will sell the iPhones without headphones or even a wall charger. Even so, Apple may suffer a big earnings miss this Christmas.

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