Apple has reversed a 15-year journey. For years, iPhone chips inspired Mac chips. Now, Mac chips are inspiring iPhone chips.
At Cupertino, Apple unveiled the A20 Pro in the new iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone Duo — its first 2-nanometre chip in a smartphone, taking cues from the M6, the processor it built for the Mac. Sri Santhanam, Apple’s VP for silicon engineering, calls it a “historical rewind”.
The details matter. Apple announced the M6, the M5 Max and M5 Ultra, which fuses two M5 Max chips, days before iPhone launch. The M6 is Apple’s first 2nm chip of any kind and the M5 Ultra its most powerful desktop processor yet. The S11 that powers Apple Watch Series 12 and Watch Ultra 4 is also on 2nm, with a security component that Apple says is the foundation for Apple Intelligence on the watch.
Why 2nm? As Kaiann Drance, VP for iPhone and Watch product marketing, explains: smaller transistors, less switching capacitance, which saves power. A 2nm chip draws less power than a 3nm one while performing better. The A20 Pro carries two neural engines, which Apple says no other smartphone chip does, giving it twice the AI compute of A19 Pro.
The result: up to 40% better sustained performance than iPhone 17 Pro, especially in iPhone Duo with a new vapour chamber covering more of chassis, along with graphite and Nano-twin copper. Memory bandwidth is up 50%.
Tom Boger, VP for Mac and iPad marketing, frames it as scalability: “All the way from the form factor of an iPhone to a Mac Studio which has tremendously higher thermal capacity, you can just watch that scalability of Apple Silicon just sing.”
Strategically, Apple is consolidating manufacturing — iPhone, Mac and Watch processors onto the same process within a fortnight — gaining supply chain leverage at a time when TSMC 2nm capacity is scarce. The foldable Duo, with a foldable display showing a 3D avatar, is the showcase. But the real story is underneath: custom packaging, vapour chamber, and power-per-watt as moat. As Drance said, “We’re building upon last year’s innovations, and we’re doing as much as we can in the size of envelope we have.”