According to a leak sent to MacRumors, iPhone identifiers (supposedly found on Apple’s backend, though no details are given) suggest that this year’s iPhone 16 models will all run on an A18 chip.
Typically, iPhone identifiers are in the format “iPhone xx,x,” where the digits before the decimal point represent the A-series processor and the digit after the decimal point represents each different model. For example, “iPhone 15,5” is an iPhone 15 Plus, “iPhone 15,4” is a regular iPhone 15, and “iPhone 16,1” is the iPhone 15 Pro. In iPhone identifiers, 14 corresponds to phones with an A15, 15 corresponds to phones with an A16, and 16 corresponds to phones with an A17.
The discovered identifiers are:
- iPhone17.1
- iPhone 17.2
- iPhone 17.3
- iPhone 17.4
- iPhone 17.5
It is five iPhone models with the identifier “17,” suggesting that they will all use an A18 chip. It’s possible that all five models are planned for this year: iPhone 16, 16 Plus, 16 Pro, and 16 Pro Max, as well as some sort of high-end “iPhone Ultra” device. We think it’s more likely that one of them represents an iPhone SE that’s expected to debut next spring.
Just because they all have the A18 name and the same family of identifiers doesn’t mean the chips will be identical. Apple could disable GPU or CPU cores in lower-end models to increase efficiencies and differentiate them. There’s precedent for this in the iPhone 13 lineup.
The iPhone 13 (iPhone 14.5 ID), iPhone 13 Pro (iPhone 14.2), and iPhone SE 2022 (iPhone 14.6) all use an A15 Bionic processor, but the Pro models have an extra GPU core and two more gigabytes of RAM (6 vs. 4). We’re likely to see a similar segmentation with this generation of iPhone.
This latest leak is in line with previous rumors that suggest we’ll see “A18” everywhere this year, with a distinction between the A18 and A18 Pro. The new chips are needed in part to run Apple Intelligence models that require a powerful Neural Engine and lots of RAM. The iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max are the only iPhones in the current lineup that will support the new Apple Intelligence features.
