It’s been claimed that Apple may rebrand the current A15 Bionic chips as an all-new A16 for the iPhone 14 launch later this year.
We had already heard reports that Apple was thinking of keeping the A15 Bionic chip around for another year. Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo previously revealed that there would be a split in performance for this year’s iPhones, with only the two Pros getting the benefits of an A16 upgrade. 
This latest report from idropnews not only confirms that claim, it claims that Apple is going to indulge in some semantic trickery into the bargain.
Apparently, while the iPhone 14 and iPhone 14 Max (it’s widely accepted there’s going to be a super-sized ‘normal’ iPhone introduced this year) will effectively be running on the same chip that’s powering the iPhone 13, Apple will rename it to the A16. This would leave the actual new chip to be rebranded the A16 Pro and fitted into the iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max.
The report claims that this is a good thing, as it will keep manufacturing costs down, thus enabling the iPhone 14 to be priced the same as the iPhone 13. But if you look at what this actually means, it’s that the iPhone 14 Pro is set for a price bump over the iPhone 13 Pro.
By introducing the iPhone 14 Max at US$100 more than the iPhone 14, the report claims, Apple is setting up a US$100 price bump for the iPhone 14 Pro in order to maintain that established US$200 gap between normal and Pro models. 
Besides a faster processor, reports suggest that Apple will seek to justify the price hike by equipping only the iPhone 14 Pro models with a new pill and punch-hole notch.
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