Apple is giving the iPhone 16 a brand new chip, instead of just sticking with last year’s hardware. The company unveiled the A18 chip at the iPhone 16 launch event today, and as you’d expect, it’s built with Apple Intelligence in mind. The chip offers more memory and a new 16-core Neural Engine, in addition to the usual speed bumps. More so than the past few years, where you could point to new camera lenses or hardware tweaks as a reason to get a new iPhone, now the A18 is key to Apple’s biggest 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 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.
Apple’s previous 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 both 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 on 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!
