On Tuesday, Apple, as usual for a September, unveiled its latest-generation tranche of iPhones, Apple Watches, wireless headphones, and the like, at its as-usual-prerecorded “Awe Inspiring” event (here’s last year’s event coverage from yours truly, if a preparatory memory refresh is necessary). Admittedly, there wasn’t anything terribly surprising unveiled, in no small part because much of it was predictable (last year’s iPhone 16 series was superseded by this year’s 17 series, for example…duh…) and a lot of it was also inevitable, “thanks” to the usual internal, partner (case suppliers and cellular carriers, for example) and supply chain players’ in-advance leaks. Never fear, however: I still found plenty of interesting (at least to me) tidbits big-and-small that I’ll be sharing in the following sections.

The chips

I’ll start with what the engineers out there are most interested in: the new phones’ internals. Much as the generational number-naming cadence for the new phones (three of them, at least: hold that thought) was predictable, so too is the cadence for their SoCs: last year’s A18 processors have been superseded by A19s (again…duh). And as usual, we don’t have a lot of details on them—clock speeds, cache size specifics, etc.—although Geekbench benchmarks on the “Pro” variant are already published. So, what do we know? Here’s the baseline A19, with a CPU cluster comprised of two performance and four efficiency cores, and a five-core GPU:

And here’s what Apple says about it:

Built on third-generation 3-nanometer technology, A19 delivers powerful performance, efficiency, and a huge boost in speed. An updated display engine, ISP, and Apple Neural Engine power features like Apple Intelligence and the latest-generation Photographic Styles. The 6-core CPU is 1.5x faster than the A15 Bionic chip in iPhone 13, and the 5-core GPU is more than 2x faster than A15 Bionic, unlocking stunning graphics and next-level mobile gaming. Neural Accelerators are also built into each GPU core to help run powerful generative AI models on device.

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