Apple's iPhone 15 Pro might only have been on sale since September of last year, but work on the iPhone 16 Pro is well and truly underway. That includes coming up with new chips for the best iPhones of the year and we've heard rumors that the A18 Pro will be the silicon of choice in 2024. We can obviously expect it to be a performant chip, but how it will compare to the best chips around today remains to be seen.
Or does it?
A new leak of a supposed Geekbench 6 run suggests that we can expect some big performance improvements not only over the chips that are currently used in the iPhone 15 or iPhone 15 Pro, but those used in the best Macs, too. Assuming the report is accurate, future iPhone buyers can expect performance like nothing we've seen in an iPhone to date.
A numbers game
The report comes via an X post by Nguyen Phi Hung, someone more known for their leaks in the Android world. According to them, the A18 Pro is capable of Geekbench 6 scores of 3,500 in single-core tests and 8,200 in multi-core tests. And while the latter isn't going to break any performance records, the former is a number that should pique the interest of benchmark fanatics everywhere.
Apple A18 Pro GB6 score is said to be 3500/8200.January 30, 2024
To put this figure into perspective, the A18 Pro's single-core score of 3,500 is considerably more than the circa 2,900 the A17 Pro manages in the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max. But the good news doesn't end there. We're going to skip the M3 and M3 Pro chips because they aren't all that different from the M3 Max, so let's jump right to that chip's single-core score of circa 3,070, a figure that's dwarfed by the A18 Pro's claimed 3,500 score.
It's important to remember that there are plenty of variables here starting with the most obvious — we can't confirm that these figures are legitimate just yet. But if they are indeed the real deal, the iPhone 16 Pro models won't be short of raw performance.
So what could Apple use that extra performance for? There are ongoing rumors that Apple intends to make a big push towards upgraded AI features in order to give Siri a much-needed shot in the arm. Faster chips will allow iPhones to perform more AI tasks on-device and in a speedier fashion to boot, too.
We're still a long way off any of this coming to fruition, though. The new AI features are likely to be part of the iOS 18 update that we expect to be announced at WWDC in June. That software is likely to be released to the public in September alongside the iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Pro models.
Before any of that happens there's the small matter of the impending Vision Pro launch on Friday, February 2. After that, we're expecting the new M2 iPad Air models to be announced including a brand-new 13-inch version. Alongside those, new OLED iPad Pros with M3 chips are also expected and then there are rumors of refreshed M3 MacBook Air laptops as well. All of this is expected to happen in March or April, suggesting the next few months could be very busy indeed.
