iPhone 18 live blog: On the ground at Apple’s biggest event

Apple has unveiled its latest top-of-the-line smartphone chip, the A20 Pro, at its recent iPhone event led by CEO John Ternus. This marks the first time the company has used a 2-nanometer chip in an iPhone, a first for the brand. The A20 Pro comes alongside a new in-house modem, the C2, and features a 6-core CPU with two of Apple's super-cores, which are 20% faster than the previous generation.

It also boasts four efficiency cores with neural accelerators, a 7-core GPU with a 40% boost over the previous model, and twice the neural accelerators for faster FP8 compute. The chip sees a 50% increase in memory bandwidth, making it the widest memory interface in an iPhone. Apple has redesigned the chip's packaging to place the silicon dies in a way that eliminates the memory from the thermal path, allowing direct attachment to a larger vapor chamber.

This design is claimed to deliver up to 40% sustained performance over the iPhone 17 Pro and 2x the performance over the iPhone 16 Pro. Apple also claims that the A20 Pro's efficiencies and new battery designs allow for increased battery life, with the iPhone 18 Pro expected to last 36 hours for video playback and 45 hours for the Pro Max, and 24 hours and 30 hours respectively on the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max. The new smartphone will start at $1,199 for the Pro model and $1,299 for the Pro Max.