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Although the release of the iPhone 14 series is still a few months away, all kinds of rumors and predictions about the iPhone 14 series have long been overwhelming - design, size, pixel improvement, etc., no exception.
This may also be the charm of the world's most concerned consumer electronics.
Nowadays, Apple's old friend Tianfeng International Guo Mingji in the latest research report, and brought us the latest rumors of the core configuration of the iPhone 14 series, which said: iPhone 14 or will continue to use the A15 processor, and the positioning of the more high-end iPhone 14 Pro series will use the latest A16 processor.
If Guo Mingxi's prediction comes true, then this will be Apple's second product construction strategy of different cores in the same generation of products after a few years.
Three factors have led Apple to sacrifice a new knife method
But for Apple, which has always been accurate in knife techniques, why should we open such a strategy on the iPhone 14 series of products, I personally think that there may be the following three reasons.
The first is the issue of cost.
It is reported that the A16 chip will use TSMC's 4nm process, and the new process will undoubtedly mean high costs, especially considering the reality of the advanced process yield problem.
What's more, a major basic reality of the current chip industry is that the lack of cores still plagues the entire industry, and the tension in production capacity is transmitted to the industry, and the manufacturer has to accept the price increase requirements of the chip factory in order to obtain sufficient production capacity.
Even Apple, as TSMC's largest customer, had to accept the price increase requested by TSMC in order to allocate sufficient advanced production capacity, but the price increase was lower than other brands.
Therefore, when the new process encounters a shortage of production capacity, the cost of the A16 processor will be no suspense.
Under the pressure of the high cost of this advanced technology, Apple lets the main shipping model use the A15 processor with a slightly lower price, of course, it will achieve certain cost savings, which is a small amount of money for products that have sold hundreds of millions of units.
The second is that the A15 processor is still excellent.
In reality, the A15 processor using TSMC's 5nm process is still the top processor in the field of smart phones at present, with an excellent energy efficiency ratio.
From the data point of view, A15 processing single-core performance is still close to two years ahead of the Android flagship processor, this Android camp flagship processor "can play nothing" reality, but also allows Apple to slow down on the performance improvement of the processor, choose to lie flat.
The third is to further build product segmentation.
By using a knife on the chip to build product segmentation, in fact Apple has already started on last year's iPhone 13 series.
At the time, while the iPhone 13 series used an A15 processor, the digital series had one less GPU core than the Pro series.
If this year's digital series continues to use A15 processors, the Pro series of rumors using A16 processors come true, it means that Apple will use the chip generation difference to further open the gap between the digital flagship and the Pro series - with the latest processor to lay the core flagship status of Pro-level products, in order to strengthen the competitiveness of Pro-level products, and further increase the average price of products.
Or an adventurous move
This shift, in fact, also means that Apple has undergone an important change in its product strategy.
After all, in the past few years, Apple has basically adopted the "chip equality" strategy in the new product strategy - the same generation of products use the same generation of chips, and then build product segmentation through product materials, screen substrates and size, how many cameras or other functions.
The only exception here is the iPhone 5 series.
Apple equipped the iPhone 5S with the first A7 processor with the first 64-bit architecture, but on the iPhone 5C released at the same time, the A6 processor was used.
But judging from the results, Apple's use of chip generation difference on the iPhone 5 series to build product segmentation was not very successful - the iPhone 5C was not very accepted by the market.
The reason is, of course, that the iPhone 5S innovation was much greater than that of the iPhone 5C, but the price gap was not obvious, but at the same time, consumers did not want to use the old components for the new products they bought.
Therefore, under the lessons of the previous car, if Apple really tries to build product segmentation with chip generation difference on the iPhone 14 series, it is undoubtedly a more risky action, especially in the reality that digital series products have become the core of Apple's sales.
Even if the current chip has already improved several times in performance with the past, there is basically no lack of performance, and even some people shout out the so-called excess performance.
But for the market, in fact, compared to the performance of the chip, perhaps consumers need more than a "new" fresh, an equal treatment.
In fact, judging from the current reviews, some consumers are dissatisfied with Apple's knife method. And this also requires Apple to show new sincerity and make up for it.
Of course, all this is still just speculation in the industry. Whether Apple will actually adopt this strategy on the iPhone 14 series is actually variable.