Apple's A16 chip may only appear on the iPhone 14 Pro

Apple analyst Ming-chi Kuo said in a tweet that he believes Apple's rumoured "A16" chip will only appear on the iPhone 14 Pro models and that the standard iPhone 14 models will continue to use the A15 Bionic chip from last year.

He also said that all four phones will likely have 6GB of memory with the key difference being that the Pro phones would use LPDDR5 memory whereas the standard phones will use LPDDR4X memory.

If true, this would be the first time in a long time that Apple used different processors to differentiate its product. The last time Apple did this was with the iPhone 5S and 5C.

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Kuo did not reveal his reasons for this move but we can speculate. Apple's new "A16" chip could be built on a more sophisticated process with poorer yields. Therefore, reserveing the newer and supposedly more powerful A16 chips for its Pro phones would be sensible thing to do.

Or perhaps Apple believes the A15 chip will be sufficient to see off whatever challenges rivals like Qualcomm and Mediatek will bring out this year. Indeed, there's some evidence to back this up. Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 chip still lags the A15 Bionic in terms of CPU performance, although its graphics performance has improved vastly.

The more cynical view, however, is that Apple wants to further differentiate the products and perhaps entice more users to jump up to the pricier Pro iPhones.

What do you think?

This article was first published in Hardware Zone.