iPhone 16 Will Be Apple’s First AI-Centric Phone

It’s the elephant in the room at this point, but yet another report suggests Apple is working to bring AI-centric upgrades to this year’s iPhone.

Bloomberg reporter Mark Gurman has released a report outlining Apple’s plans for the Mac. The company is working on new in-house M4 chips with a focus on artificial intelligence.

Buried within the report is a quip about the iPhone 16’s processor. Gurman says Apple is “also planning to make AI-focused upgrades to this year’s iPhone processor.” No surprise there, given what we’ve already heard about the iPhone 16 and iOS 18.

While Gurman didn’t elaborate about the specific changes Apple’s making to its chip, all signs point to the iPhone gaining new hardware and software capabilities, many of which revolve around artificial intelligence.

From a hardware standpoint, the iPhone 16 series is expected to have Apple’s in-house A18 chip on board.

iPhone 16 Processor Will Boost AI

Haitong International Securities analyst Jeff Pu claims the base iPhone 16 models, presumably called iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Plus, will come with Apple’s A18 chip and 8GB of RAM.

The higher-end models, likely called iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max, will reportedly come with an A18 Pro processor. He’s reiterated this stance in newer notes.

This has been backed up by a report from a leaker on Chinese micro-blogging site Weibo who says the lower-end models will come with the first Apple chip specifically designed for the standard models.

If true, it means the iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Plus would skip the company’s A17 chip, the chip that’s currently on board the iPhone 15.

Early iOS 18 code, seen by MacRumors, hints at this being the case and Economic Daily News says Apple’s upcoming A18 and M4 chips will feature an upgraded Neural Engine with more cores. This should improve the devices AI learning capabilities.

iPhone 16 & iOS 18

Gurman says Apple “is planning to highlight the AI processing capabilities of the components and how they’ll integrate with the next version of macOS, which will be announced in June at Apple’s annual developer conference.”

Indeed, WWDC 24 will likely serve as the jump off point for Apple’s AI era. The show, which kicks off on June 10th, will provide us with a first glimpse at the software set to power the iPhone 16 models.

Every indication is that iOS 18 will be stocked with AI features which are said to include updates to Siri and popular apps like Keynote.

In an earlier report about iOS 18, Gurman stated that iOS 18 “needs to be extra-impressive because the iPhone 16’s hardware won’t have any major advances.” He thinks Apple is “banking on the software to sell people on the new models.”

And thanks to this new processor, which will likely be required for more advanced AI features, the iPhone 16 series should have a leg up on its predecessors.

We expect the iPhone 16 release date to land in September.