iPhone 17 Pro and entire iPhone 18 series tipped for a very important upgrade

(Image credit: Future)

published 16 October 2024

Quick Summary

Apple is reportedly planning to upgrade the RAM in the iPhone 17 Pro / Max to 12GB, partly to better handle Apple Intelligence.

The same upgrade is predicted to arrive in all iPhone 18 models.

Apple's approach to the iPhone Pro and Pro Max is well established now: each year the Pro iPhones get the newest, most cutting-edge hardware and it then rolls down to other models the following year. And that pattern is tipped to continue with the iPhone 17 Pro, iPhone 17 Pro Max and iPhone 18.

The iPhone 17 Pro has already been said to be getting an upgrade to 12GB of memory, compared to the 8GB of the current iPhone 16s. And now a new report says the same extra memory is coming to the entire iPhone 18 range.

What upgrades are coming to the iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 18?

According to a post on Chinese social media, as reported by MacRumors, the A20 chip inside the iPhone 18 range will be significantly different to previous generations.

It'll deliver an upgrade to 12GB across the board, and it'll move to a different design called Wafer-Level Multi-Chip Module, or WMCM for short. WMCM enables more efficient chip design when there are multiple components to be arranged together.

The memory upgrade is important, because according to Apple, the minimum hardware requirement for Apple Intelligence is 8GB – and that's the amount of memory in each of the current iPhone 16 models.

According to respected analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, next year's iPhone 17 Pro will be upgraded to 12GB – and it'll also use a more efficient two-nanometre chip, but only in the Pro and Pro Max versions due to cost reasons. It's likely, but not confirmed, that the 12GB upgrade will then trickle down to standard iPhones in the 2026 iPhone 18.

The chip leaker, as MacRumors points out, has a good track record – they were first to report the use of the A15 Bionic chip in the iPhone 14 and the A16 in the iPhone 14 Pro. So this particular prediction seems solid.

The more Apple Intelligence is expected to do, the more RAM your iPhone will need to run it.

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Writer, musician and broadcaster Carrie Marshall has been covering technology since 1998 and is particularly interested in how tech can help us live our best lives. Her CV is a who’s who of magazines, newspapers, websites and radio programmes ranging from T3, Techradar and MacFormat to the BBC, Sunday Post and People’s Friend. Carrie has written more than a dozen books, ghost-wrote two more and co-wrote seven more books and a Radio 2 documentary series; her memoir, Carrie Kills A Man, was shortlisted for the British Book Awards. When she’s not scribbling, Carrie is the singer in Glaswegian rock band Unquiet Mind (unquietmindmusic).