A New A18 Chip

Many rumors also suggested that Apple would discontinue the tradition that began with the iPhone 14 of using last year’s iPhone Pro chips in the new base iPhone models.

While this was a pretty believable rumor, especially after Apple announced Apple Intelligence, we still needed the company to confirm it. 

Luckily, this rumor was true. Apple announced that the base iPhone 16 models would not use an older A17 chip from the iPhone 15 Pro but instead would get the entirely new A18 Chip. While the iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max still pack a more powerful A18 Pro version, the performance between the two is much closer than it’s been in recent years. 

Apple is combining the newer chip with the increase in RAM to make all the iPhone 16 models capable of handling Apple Intelligence, Apple’s new AI technology that will be available with iOS 18.1 — at least to some extent.