Apple’s new iPhones are a new future for the Mac (again)
Apple quite evidently ploughed the ground to prepare for its next crop of exciting new products during the iPhone 17 launch. The new processor inside the Pro models is quite evidently powerful enough to drive a new class of Macs.
“This is MacBook Pro levels of compute in an iPhone,” Tim Mallet, VP of platform architecture said during the Apple Event. That statement spoke volumes, given recent speculation the company plans a lower cost Mac powered by an iPhone chip.
With the A17 Pro, that chip is already here.
The 3nm A19 Pro, boosted by Apple’s vapor chamber, is capable, powerful, built to support artificial intelligence (AI), and the impressive performance the company alluded to during the Apple event can be tweaked even higher if placed inside larger systems with more extensive cooling systems.
You get:
- A 16-core Neural engine for power efficient AI
- A 6-core CPU
- A 6-core GPU.
This should deliver astonishingly delightful experiences on iPhone, just as it may on a Mac.
How does Apple benefit?
There are three immediately obvious ways introducing an A series Mac may benefit Apple:
- Scale: we have heard that TSMC has raised the cost of its processors. In that regard it makes sense for Apple to move Macs to A series chips as it already makes millions of those chips, which implies some cost savings per chip.
- Price: If Apple does decide to use the processors inside lower cost Macs then it will be widening its addressable market at the very same time as users are most likely to be tempted to switch platforms rather than invest in Windows 11 PCs.
- Diversification: By introducing a new Mac tier, Apple can create space in which to become more price flexible across its range, while still servicing a market at a wider variety of price points.
That Apple can proudly point out that its Macs are at least as powerful as any other system you can get is most certainly icing on the cake.
This all looks promising.. consumers get even more choice of Macs, Apple gets even more business flexibility, and the wider industry will have to concede that no other PC maker has Apple’s hard-won advantages.
And Apple can supercharge development of M series processors for its premium Macs at the very same time.
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