We've seen plenty of iPhone 14 leaks and rumors. From a new design to a big battery, we've heard a variety of things. – but what just might be the most disappointing one is the choice of the chipset.
We heard this back in March that Apple will use two different chipsets for the iPhone 14 lineup depending on the model. The iPhone 14 Pro variants will get the new A16 bionic processors while the regular 14 and Max will get last year's A15 chipsets. Industry analysts said that this could be due to the global chip shortage and this will be a one-off thing.
Apple would start offering the latest processor for all the iPhone variants as they have always done in the past. Turns out, that is not going to happen.
Apple analyst, Ming Chie Kuo says that all the future iPhones will follow this dual-chip strategy where non-Pro iPhones will no longer have the latest Apple processors. Well, money. I mean it's Apple, what did you expect. Even their whole saving the environment thing is purely just to make more money.
You see, right now, the best-selling new iPhone every year is the basic non-Pro model. Like the iPhone 13 is the best-selling phone of this year. Apple wants to change that. They want more people to buy their pro phones because the profit margin is way bigger there. And the expectation is that offering the latest chip on just the Pro variants will make more people consider the Pro instead of the regular iPhone. In fact, Ming-Chi Kuo says that this move will increase the sales of the iPhones 14 Pro and Max to 55-60% of the total iPhone volume in the second half of this year, up from 40% to 50% share in the past. And that is a big number.
Now, I'm sure there are many who say that it's not a big deal as A15 is already fast enough. You see, while I absolutely agree that most users won't notice any difference in performance between A15 and A16 chips. But you need to keep in mind that these SoC are more than just benchmarks and speed. For example, the Image Signal Processor (ISP) in the A-Series chips is generally closely tied to Apple’s yearly camera advancements.
You might not feel an extra 10-15% on geekbench in your regular usage of the phone, but you could notice that the camera on the regular iPhone 14 didn't get much of a year-over-year upgrade. If it was a one-off thing, I don't think it was a very big deal but it's not and that's what bugs me the most because these shameless Android companies are writing this down and I'm sure if Apple is doing it, these Android companies will follow suit just like they did with the headphone jack, breaking the $1000 price barrier, no charger bandwagon and many more. Yeah, I'm looking at you Samsung.
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