When Apple releases a new iPhone, it's always quick to point out how much faster it is than last year's iPhone. Often, it boasts a big percentage jump in performance. After showing off iPhone Air and iPhone 17 Pro at its "awe dropping" September event, Apple did just that with the new A19 Pro chip.
Apple says the iPhone 17 Pro offers up to 40% better sustained performance than the iPhone 16 Pro. Regarding the iPhone Air's AI performance, Apple estimates that the new neural accelerators located on each of the five GPU cores give the A19 Pro a 3x gain in the peak GPU compute compared to last year's A18 Pro.
Watch this: iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max: All the New Features You Need to Know 04:31
But before he ended his bit about the iPhone Air's performance, Apple's SVP of Hardware Engineering John Ternus gave us this unusual line: "This is MacBook Pro levels of compute in an iPhone, perfect for GPU-intensive AI workloads."
That's the first time I've heard an iPhone's performance compared to that of a MacBook. Of course, Tetanus didn't say which model of MacBook Pro he was using for the comparison, but it's certainly a bold statement to go right to the most powerful MacBook.
The iPhone Air features an A19 Pro chip with a five-core GPU that has a neural accelerator on each core to assist with AI workloads. Matt Elliott/CNET
Here are my two takeaways from this statement:
1. Apple is feeling the pressure to catch up to Google Gemini-powered Pixel phones in the generative-AI race and is signaling that a serious AI upgrade to Siri is coming sooner than later. When it does arrive, Apple likely wants us all to know that the iPhones it released today have the goods to perform the on-device AI tasks of the new-and-improved, AI-enhanced Siri.
2. In the coming year, we might see a MacBook based not on an M5 chip but on the A19 Pro. I doubt we'll see a budget MacBook Pro based on anything other than Apple's latest M-series processor, but it wouldn't surprise me to see the rumored $599 MacBook Air get the A19 Pro, or at least an M-series chip based on the same architecture.
A19 Pro specs and the different performance claims
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