Here's what Apple's new A20 Pro chip means for you

If you're considering whether the iPhone 18 Pro is worth your money this year, the answer likely hinges on one unseen component: the chip inside it.

Apple just put its first 2nm chip inside an iPhone, and the timing matters more than you might think. The real "first" already went to the M6 chip in last month's Mac mini, so what you're getting here is Apple's newest process node, not a world debut. Still, the jump is real.

You get six CPU cores, including two new "super cores". Apple says it runs up to 20% faster than last year's, plus four efficiency cores handling the lighter workloads in the background.

You get a significant bump in graphics performance from this year’s chip, with the redesigned 7-core GPU offering up to 40% improved performance and 50% increased memory bandwidth, which is something you would experience mostly in gaming and video editing.

In case you use on-device artificial intelligence (AI), the new chip offers double the floating-point performance as the previous version.

The number of cores of the Neural Engine was doubled to two 16-core blocks for a total of 32 cores, which, according to Apple, offers twice the compute capability than the previous generation while consuming less energy.

This is the feature which allows running sophisticated on-device AI models without running your battery down and without having an internet connection, according to Apple – and this is their first 2-nanometre chip ever.

Apple iPhone 18 Pro series price

The iPhone 18 Pro starts at $1,199, $100 more than last year's 17 Pro, while the Pro Max starts at $1,299 and climbs to 2TB of storage. Pre-orders open September 12, with phones shipping September 18, and if you're eyeing the foldable instead, the same A20 Pro chip is powering the iPhone Duo too.