Final 12 months Apple launched the iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Plus with the A16 Bionic chip, and the iPhone 15 Professional and iPhone 15 Professional Max with the A17 Professional, introducing much more differentiation between the Professional and non-Professional fashions. This wasn’t very properly obtained, and it seems to be an particularly egregious transfer in hindsight now, when you think about that solely the iPhone 15 Professional and iPhone 15 Professional Max assist Apple Intelligence, exactly due to the chipset.
The excellent news is that it looks as if Apple is not going to do the identical factor this 12 months. In line with code found in Apple’s backend, all 4 iPhone 16 fashions will likely be powered by an A18 chip.
There may nonetheless be a two-tier system, the place the non-Professional iPhone 16s get the A18 whereas the Professionals get an A18 Professional or one thing like that, however a minimum of the cheaper units will not be caught with final 12 months’s SoC.
If Apple does go the tiered approach, then the vanilla fashions may get a smaller variety of GPU cores, both binned or disabled. The fascinating bit is that 5 fashions had been found in Apple’s code, and it is nonetheless a thriller what the fifth will likely be – hypothesis says it could very properly be the subsequent iPhone SE, which may launch in early 2025 with the identical chip because the iPhone 16 household.
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