iPhone 14: what if the Pro model was the only one to benefit from the A16 chip?

It doesn’t necessarily smell very good for performance enthusiasts. Corroborating a rumor shared by Ming-Chi Kuo, the firm TrendForce is now confident to say that two of the four iPhone 14s expected this fall will have the same chip as the current ones iPhone 13 and iPhone 13 Pro.

9to5Mac said he was able to confirm this with his sources. In other words: we are heading towards a most amazing vintage this year at Apple.

Merchandise deception

It’s regulated like a Swiss watch. Invariably, Apple demonstrates its new smartphones every year at the start of the school year, which are powered by the latest version of its in-house SoC. In 2022, the A16 Bionic was to be put in the spotlight. But, it will not be available to everyone.

After three separate sources say they were able to confirm the information, there is almost no doubt that only the iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max will feature the A16 Bionic. The iPhone 14 and iPhone 14 Max should run on a “superior” version of the current A15. We explain.

While, technically speaking, all of Apple’s current line benefits from the same SoC (yes, even the most affordable iPhone SE), they don’t have the same amount of RAM. In this case, the iPhone SE, iPhone 13 mini and iPhone 13 have 4 GB of RAM, compared to 6 GB for the Pro models. It is from this latest version that the next Apple smartphones should inherit.

A market shaken by the crisis

What can encourage the firm to review its plans in this way? The answer is not very difficult to find. Just as we learned last week that the iPhone 14 Max could be released several weeks late, this news confirms that the smartphone industry’s production lines are under water.

Not only overwhelmed, assembly plants would also struggle to provide the main components to produce enough A16 chips. That Apple finally decides to reopen its old boxes of A15 chips would represent less an act marked by cynicism than a stopgap solution preventing it from having to delay, as in 2021, the release of its new iPhones.

Nevertheless, Apple would still have an opportunity to be cynical. As noted 9to5Mac, the firm is not shy about offering a new name to chipsets already seen in the past. The M1 chip, for example, could very well have been called A14X given the number of points in common it shares with the traditional A14 chip (there are simply more cores on the CPU and the GPU).

So we can imagine that, in order not to lose face and in a clever sleight of hand, Apple is trying to sell us an A15 from last year as a revolutionary novelty. And wouldn’t that be the most “Apple” thing ever?

Source : 9to5Mac