Apple is giving every iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Pro model brand new chips, instead of just using last year’s hardware in its cheaper phones. The company unveiled the A18 and A18 Pro chips at the iPhone 16 launch event today, and as you’d expect, they’re built with Apple Intelligence in mind. The chips offers more memory and a new 16-core Neural Engine, in addition to some incremental performance boosts over older models. More so than the past few years — where you could point to new camera lenses or hardware tweaks as a reason to get the new iPhone — the chip is the key selling point for the iPhone 16 lineup.
Other than last year’s iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max, older iPhones can’t run Apple Intelligence features like the revamped Siri, Genmoji and integrated ChatGPT search. (Anyone who splurged for those higher end iPhones chose wisely, as there’s little reason to upgrade.) AI workloads require plenty of RAM to juggle large language models, so that alone disqualifies the iPhone 15 and 15 Plus, which only had 6GB of RAM on the A16 chip (a holdover from the iPhone 14 Pro). The iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max, on the other hand, featured 8GB of RAM with the A17 Pro chip.
The A18 chip, along with thermal design optimizations, helps the iPhone 16 achieve 30 percent faster sustained gaming performance, according to Apple. And just like the A17 Pro last year, the new chip supports hardware accelerated ray tracing, which helps it deliver more realistic lighting in some titles. Apple also revealed that Honor of Kings: World will be coming to iPhones next year.
Apple’s A18 Pro goes a step further than the A18, delivering up to 15 percent faster speeds than the A17 Pro, as well as 2x faster hardware-accelerated ray tracing. Notably, the A18 Pro also uses 20 percent less power than the A17 Pro. All of that hardware isn’t just meant for Apple Intelligence, it also powers the complex new photography features in the iPhone 16 Pro’s cameras.
Apple’s older strategy of using the previous year’s chips on the iPhone and iPhone Plus made sense. Those devices didn’t require the demanding camera processing of the Pro models, which were entirely geared towards power users. Apple could cut manufacturing costs and still deliver a solid user experience for iPhone owners with older chips. (Even though it debuted in 2022, the A16 chip in the iPhone 15 is still very capable today.)
But now that Apple is centering the iPhone experience around Apple Intelligence, a family-wide spec bump isn’t too surprising. And even if you’re not excited about Apple’s AI offerings (which they’ll never actually call AI), it’s nice to have some more RAM in the base iPhone line.
Catch up on all the news from Apple’s iPhone 16 event!
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