The horrible trick that Apple played last year by incorporating only the new chip in Apple’s professional generation continues to give a lot of talk and even more so this year in 2023, when Apple has presented the A17 Pro chip, a new processor that has the last name Pro in instead of Bionic, which means that if it continues with the same strategy, Apple would incorporate a Pro processor in the iPhone 16 bases. Fortunately, analyst Jeff Pu has shed light on this matter.
iPhone 16 with single processor
As you well know, Apple continues in its line of increasingly differentiating both generations of iPhone. Apple is betting on including processors from different generations between both generations in order to delve into a differentiation between segments that is increasingly noticeable. Despite the criticism that Apple has received for this strategy, its roadmap remains clear and in fact, it is going to delve into it in the iPhone 16.
As you have been able to know Jeff Pu through investment firm Haitong International Securities this week and that Mac rumors have been echoed, the report indicates that “We will see the A17 Pro as a transitional design and now we expect that all iPhone 16 models will have included the A18, in TSMC’s N3E.” Specifically, in his article he indicates the following:
- iPhone 16: A18 (N3E) chip
- iPhone 16 Plus: A18 (N3E) chip
- iPhone 16 Pro: A18 Pro (N3E) chip
- iPhone 16 Pro Max: A18 Pro (N3E) chip
What does this tell us?
The results of this study and publication of the report, they report that Apple engineers are going to follow a very simple strategy with the iPhones and similar to the one that takes place in the First and second generation Apple Silicon, That is, have a standard or base generation, and under the same architecture, launch a Pro version, a more professional version for the iPhone 16 Pro.
Therefore, we can say that the iPhone 16 will not have the A17 Pro chip, but they will have the 3nm A18 chip manufactured by TSMC. This makes our questions clear: on the one hand, the iPhone 16 will have a few generations, that is, it will not have an A17 Pro chip, so the performance jump will be much larger between generations. On the other hand, Apple will develop two processors for its new iPhones with different features and to tell the truth, I prefer it to having the feeling that I have an iPhone from last year.
This also raises one more question for me: will the iPhone 15 receive five years of support? This issue is important because the base series processors are going to take a huge leap and it is possible that previous models will not be able to support the new iOS features because they will be designed for more powerful processors.
In conclusion, there are still many months left until the launch of the new iPhone, so it is possible that we will not know the names of the different processors of the iPhone 16 until later in 2024, but what does seem clear is that Apple is going to choose to follow the same line of development that it has on the Mac. The question is: when will it do it with the iPad?