With new iPhone models around the corner, it should be worth noting that the next standard iPhone 18 won’t be part of Apple’s September iPhone launch; instead, the company will introduce that smartphone alongside the lower-end iPhone 18e. Since we expect the iPhone 18 Pro and the “iPhone Ultra” foldable to feature the A20 Pro chip, the next lower-end iPhone models will more than likely feature the base A20 chip.
Previous rumors suggested that the regular iPhone 18 will feature 12GB of RAM, just like the current iPhone Air and iPhone 17 Pro models. However, a new report from Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo suggests otherwise, as he claims that the lower-end iPhone 18 models will have 9GB of memory instead, which would be an interesting amount of memory. According to Kuo, the A20 chip that is destined for Apple’s lower-end iPhones will feature 1.5GB x 6 dies for a total of 9GB of memory, whereas the current implementation of the A19 chip features 2GB x 4 dies for a total of 8GB of memory.
I don’t know about you, but a 12.5% increase in memory just feels bare minimum to say the least, especially when you just get one gigabyte of “extra” memory. After all, when we went from 8GB on iPhone 16 Pro to 12GB on iPhone 17 Pro, that was a 50% jump in the amount of memory. Sure, every gigabyte of memory counts when it comes to having the most optimal AI performance by running AI models, but what’s even crazier is that Apple’s most powerful on-device AI model will require at least 12GB of memory, so if this rumor turns out to be true, that means both the iPhone 18 and the iPhone 18e will not even support that on-device model. With the ongoing memory chip shortages, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that it could be a cost-cutting measure, and with this week’s price hikes across several Apple product categories, we’ll likely see similar price hikes take effect on the iPhone 18 Pro models and likely the lower-end iPhone models as well.
