While not as flashy as the iPhone 16 Pro, Apple’s fall debut of the iPhone 16 is important due to the addition of Apple Intelligence. Here are the top features that will make a difference for those in the market for an upgrade.
While not as flashy as the iPhone 16 Pro, Apple’s fall debut of the iPhone 16 is important due to the addition of Apple Intelligence. Here are the top features that will make a difference for those in the market for an upgrade.
The rumor mill never stops for the iPhone, but lately it has focused more on changes to the iPhone 16 Pro models. Even so, there will still be changes coming for the non-Pro models arriving at the same time.
With fewer than three months until Apple launches its new models, these are the features you should watch out for in the iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Plus.
iPhone 16 upgrades: A17
One thing that almost certainly will be happening is a chip upgrade. Since the iPhone 14, Apple has shifted to a system where the newest chip releases would apply to the Pro models, while the non-Pro used the previous one.
The Pro models for the iPhone 14 and iPhone 15 used the A16 Bionic and A17 Pro respectively, while the non-Pro used the A15 Bionic and A16 Bionic.
The change allowed the Pro models to have a significantly more powerful chip than the non-Pro, without Apple needing to design two different tiers of chip each year.
If that continues for the iPhone 16, it is likely that the A17 Pro chip will be reused for the iPhone 16 while the iPhone 16 Pro line will move to the A18 chip. There have also been rumors that the A18 will be used across the board.
Regardless of what it gets, the change in chip will be significant to the iPhone 16. The A17 accompanied with 8GB of RAM is the first iPhone chip made to be compatible with Apple Intelligence.
Apple Intelligence is the company’s big push in machine learning, with generative AI and more contextual answers a big part of the initiative. As the A17 is capable of doing the work and the A16 cannot, a shift to the A17 at least is imperative for the next iPhone releases.
For reference, the A16 Bionic’s 16-core Neural Engine can handle up to 17 trillion operations per second. The A17 Pro’s version can go up to 35 trillion operations per second.
