So the iPhone 17 Pro is official, and just as I expected, the specs are overkill in the best way possible! Whether it's the cinema-grade camera specs that have this content creator salivating or the the new vapor chamber cooling system that looks straight out of a gaming PC.
But one thing really stuck out — the A19 Pro chipset sounds like a beast. With upgrades to the CPU architecture and drastic improvements to the GPU cores with neural accelerators in each one, this is going to break new ground in performance and power efficiency.
“This is MacBook Pro levels of compute in an iPhone,” Tim Mallet, VP of platform architecture said during the Apple Event. And once I heard that, I immediately thought about the rumors of a lower-cost MacBook that is said to sport one of Apple’s mobile chips.
You see, in something like an iPhone, for what most people do with their devices (power users excluded), this is overkill. But put this in a MacBook and charge $599 for it, you could be looking at the next best laptop.
Dissecting A19 Pro
So let’s tear into A19 Pro and see what makes it tick. This is built on a 3nm process for an insane amount of transistors — with a 6-core CPU (2x performance and 4x efficiency) and a 5-core GPU with Neural Accelerators on each core.
Think of this like when you see an Nvidia GPU packing Tensor Cores alongside CUDA cores. It’s a one-two punch of graphics rendering power that unlocks the AI potential of them too. This is critical for any on-device generative AI task like smart image editing or object recognition.
This gives the iPhone 17 Pro everything it needs to run AAA games, do advanced video edits and even run LLMs locally for fast and secure AI interactions. And I get the focus is very much on the efficiency side of it (especially if your aim is to get the super thin iPhone Air to last an entire day), but what if you turned up the wattage going through that A19 Pro for a MacBook?
How fast is A19 Pro?
Geekbench results have been leaked — both for CPU and GPU testing. So how does it fare against the current crop of laptops? Bear in mind that as I do this, I'm comparing a phone with much bigger and (supposedly) beefier systems.
Device |
Geekbench 6.4 single-core |
Geekbench 6.4 multi-core score |
Geekbench 6.4 GPU score |
|---|---|---|---|
iPhone 17 Pro (A19 Pro) |
3,895 |
9,746 |
45,657 |
Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3x (Snapdragon X) |
2,124 |
10,505 |
13,760 |
Acer Swift Go 14 AI (AMD Ryzen AI 7 350) |
2,888 |
13,737 |
26,523 |
Dell 14 Plus (Intel Core Ultra 7 256V) |
2,721 |
10,890 |
29,240 |
The results are startling — worth me saying that much of this is from our own testing, but I had to source some averages from Geekbench's benchmark browser to fill in some gaps. But as you can see, nothing in this mid-range even comes close to A19 Pro's single-core speed.
Unsurprisingly, multi-core is where laptop chips with higher wattages excels, but everything swings very hard back in Apple's favor when graphics are concerned. These are ludicrous numbers for a phone, and make for a mightily competitive MacBook at this price.
Not impossible
Technologically, this is a step down from the M4 you’d find in the MacBook Air, but possibly not by much if you did that. At the moment, I’m just vaguely comparing apples and oranges here.
But from what I see, plus with a little bit of guesswork and assumption from the % increase in speed we see year-over-year on the iPhone, this should be able to zippily run macOS Tahoe. Not only that, but given its focus on efficiency, the battery life potential with a bigger laptop cell is rather tasty.
Plus, in a bigger shell like a MacBook, you won’t need the same engineering efforts for the iPhone 17 Pro or iPhone Air’s vapor chamber to keep it cool. I’m sure that Apple would still want to do that, but you could get away with some more ordinary heat pipes to maintain sustained performance.
Outlook
MacBooks are great and all, but there is definitely a price barrier even to the entry level right now — so much so, that I’m sure the $599 M1 MacBook Air at Walmart and the $699 M2 option at Best Buy are selling like hotcakes.
So to curtail people buying older versions of your tech, Apple needs to disrupt in a big way. And bringing back the 12-inch MacBook (you can ditch the butterfly keyboard), packing in A19 Pro and pricing it at $599 would be a damn good way to do it.
I recently wrote about how gaming handhelds are the new netbooks. While that’s true, the ultimate message was me crying out for the return of something like a netbook — something ultra small and portable that is zippy enough for everyday productivity. The Cupertino crew has a chance to make this one lad’s dream come true.
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