Apple’s A18 Chips Tipped to Power Entire iPhone 16 Lineup

iPhone 16 lineup is expected to launch in September with a few upgrades over last year’s iPhone family. Early rumours suggested that the top-end iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max models will usher in a new A-series processor. At the same time, the regular iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Plus were believed to pack the A17 Pro Bionic chip found in this year’s iPhone 15 Pro models. Now, a leaked code from Apple’s backend indicates that Apple is planning to arm the same A18 SoC across the entire iPhone 16 lineup.

iPhone 16 identifiers leaked

Back-end code discovered by Nicolas Alvarez (@nicolas09F9) and reported by MacRumors revealed that Apple will release four iPhone models this year and they will run on the same A18 chip. The discovered identifiers are — iPhone 17,1, iPhone 17,2, iPhone 17,3, iPhone 17,4, and iPhone 17,5. All five start with the same number, which reportedly indicates that Apple plans to use the same chip for them. The fifth identified could be used for another device, possibly a future iPhone SE variant.

Apple usually links the identifier to the chip being used. Last year’s iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Plus, which use the A16 Bionic SoC, came with identifiers iPhone 15,4 and iPhone 15,5. Both the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max fueled by the A17 Pro Bionic chipset, have identifiers iPhone 16,1 and iPhone 16,2. 

If Apple follows this familiar identifier numbering scheme this year, we can expect all four iPhone 16 models to ship with the same A18 chip. The company might bring a two-tier system by packing an A18 on the standard models and an A18 Pro chip with different GPU and CPU scores on the iPhone 16 Pro models. We’ve heard several rumours corroborating these claims. 

Apple has not revealed any details about the forthcoming iPhone models yet. Therefore, all these details should be considered with a pinch of salt.