Apple A20 Pro preview: 2nm, Neural Engine, CPU, and GPU gains, and more
Macworld When the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone Ultra launch this September, Apple will power them with the newest A-series chip. As in recent years, the next-generation processor will likely be split into two, with a full-performance “Pro” version and a non-Pro model made for lower-cost products. All of the products released this fall are expected to use the Pro version of the chip. We won’t know for sure what it can do until we get to test it, but we can examine the history and performance of the A-series processors from the last several years, along with the recent rumors and overall industry trends, to anticipate what we might expect from Apple’s new iPhone silicon this fall. Of course, this is all just an educated guess—Apple is famously secretive, and the details about its products are often not fully revealed until they are released. Sometimes, details are kept under wraps even then. The first 2nm iPhone chip The A19 Pro was made with TSMC’s advanced 3-nanometer “N3E” process, building on years of refinement since the A17 Pro first brought 3nm to mass-market devices. TSMC is now ramping production of 2nm process technology, and the A20 Pro is expected to be Apple’s first 2nm product. This new manufacturing process is expected to allow about 15 percent higher transistor density for chips like Apple’s, along with improvements to both performance and power usage, but just how much better performance or lower power you get out of it will depend on the characteristics of the design. The bottom line is, this new process gives Apple more room for more cores, more cache, and higher-performance core designs while staying within the strict power and thermal budget required for a smartphone. Also, just as the iPhone Air features a version of the A19 Pro that has one fewer GPU core enabled, the rumored iPhone Ultra and any iPhone Air successor could very well feature a somewhat handicapped version of the A20 chip as well. Of note: Apple is said to be using a new chip packaging process, called Wafer-Level Multi-Chip Module (WMCM) packaging. It’s a different method of connecting parts of a multiple silicon dies together in a high-speed fashion. For the A20, it’s likely to mean that Apple can place the RAM chips to the side instead of stacking it on top of the main processor, without sacrificing speed. That takes up a little more horizontal space on the mainboard, but it should provide for better cooling of the main A20 and RAM. CPU performance holds the crown Apple’s CPU performance improvements have been remarkably steady over time. Both single-core and multi-core performance shows a drumbeat of regular increases that are almost linear year after year. It’s honestly kind of amazing, if you follow CPU design and architecture trends. Because Apple’s yearly performance gains are so consistent, we feel pretty confident predicting the A20’s performance. There will likely be a 6-core CPU again, with two performance and four efficiency cores. With the debut of the M5, Apple re-branded its performance cores to “Super Cores,” a meaningless marketing move. Don’t be surprised if the A20 Pro features “Super Cores” as well. Foundry An estimated single-core CPU score of around 4,200 would place the A20 Pro in the same league as the M5 (for a single high-performance core), and way above the best Intel and AMD desktop processors or any processor found in any Android phone. When it comes to phone-capable chips, Apple is so far out ahead in single-core performance that it’s hardly worth mentioning. Foundry Multi-core performance is a different story. Apple’s CPU is no slouch, and will probably break 10,000 in the A20 Pro. But some Android products reach this level, and of course most processors aimed at laptops and desktops do. These all feature far more than Apple’s six cores, so naturally, multi-core performance benefits. The takeaway is this: For the last several years, there has been no processor in any smartphone that delivers overall CPU performance equal to Apple’s, and the A20 Pro will surely retain that performance crown. GPU performance for AI and more GPU performance is tricky. The GPU is used for graphics rendering of course, which has its own performance criteria, but it’s also used for parallel computing tasks like running machine learning algorithms. GPU performance is usually highly dependent on memory bandwidth, which is shared with the rest of the chip. The GPU performance gain for Apple’s A-series chips has been a little irregular. Sometimes, the GPU architecture doesn’t change much; it just runs at a higher clock speed, perhaps with a bit more cache or memory bandwidth. Other times, Apple makes serious changes to the architecture to increase efficiency and add features. We don’t know what to expect this year, but we can assume Apple sees the GPU as a big priority, given how important its performance is to AI. Foundry The compute performance of Apple’s GPU design took a big leap last year thanks to a new architecture aimed at improving that aspect in particular. It probably won’t shoot up as far again this year, but a boost of more than 10 percent seems reasonable. When it comes to performance in high-end 3D graphics rendering, as in AAA premium games, again we saw a big improvement with the new GPU architecture last year in the A19 Pro but most other years the gains are less dramatic. Foundry Over 50 frames per second in the 3DMark Solar Bay Unlimited benchmark would be a good result. That’s over double the real-world graphics performance in just three years. Foundry On the less intensive Wild Life Unlimited benchmark, Apple passed the 100 frames per second threshold two years ago, so it’s not crazy to think we could see a result over 150 this time. That would represent about a 65 percent improvement over three years. GPU performance is one of those areas where Apple doesn’t completely dominate in its chip design, and it will be interesting to see if the company invests more heavily in it over the next few years, allocating more of the chip’s area to the GPU to cram in more cores, bigger caches, or other performance-improving features. The GPU is very important for local AI tasks, and that seems to be a major focus for Apple. Good news for gamers—you benefit, too. Neural Engine is more important than ever Apple has had a dedicated NPU (Neural Processing Unit), which it calls the Neural Engine, since the A11 was introduced with the iPhone X. The first Neural Engine could do 600 billion operations per second, while Apple’s latest chips do over 35 trillion. The Neural Engine is sort of like a GPU, but tailored specifically to run the sort of specialized matrix operations that most AI and machine learning models require. It’s not just about Siri or Apple Intelligence, either. The Neural Engine is used in dozens of areas throughout your iPhone, from taking photos to recording audio without background noise to copying text out of an image. With the heavy push to big fancy AI models, NPUs are more important than ever, and the their performance doesn’t necessarily scale with the “trillions of operations per second” statistic. Memory bandwidth, cache, and support for special compact data formats all play a big role in NPU performance. Foundry Geekbench has a special separate AI benchmark that runs common machine learning and AI tasks on the CPU, GPU, or NPU. When we look at the results when running on the NPU, we see a some big improvements, including a near-doubling in the last three years. There’s no question that Apple has big NPU plans. Recent claims have said that the NPU takes up a lot more of the chip area on the A20—if that’s true and Apple can keep up with the memory bandwidth for it, our chart above could be very wrong in a very good way, and we could be in for another big jump in NPU performance as we saw between the A17 and A18. RAM, N2, and more Beyond the CPU, GPU, and Neural Engine, the A20 Pro package will be paired with other critical components. First, there’s RAM. This is a tricky one. It’s probably too soon to expect LPDDR6 memory and the big boost in bandwidth and efficiency it will bring, but Apple will probably use high-speed LPDDR5x memory and maybe a wider memory bus. So many critical features are dependent on high memory bandwidth. AI also depends on having lots of RAM—LLMs are big. The A19 Pro has 12GB of RAM, while the regular A19 only has 8GB, and it already makes a difference: The new and improved dictation and more emotive Siri voice in iOS 27 require devices that have extra RAM. On the other hand, RAM prices have gone up more than 5x in the last year alone, making RAM super expensive. Apple probably wants to attach 16GB of RAM to the A20 Pro, but we wouldn’t be surprised to see 12GB, just because the market is totally nuts right now, even for Apple. Then we have the wireless chips. Apple used its own 5G chip (the C1) in the iPhone 16e and followed up with the surprise C1X in the iPhone Air that’s both faster and more energy efficient. Apple’s new iPhones may use the C1X, but we’re actually expecting the C2, which should further improve performance, add mmWave support in some markets, and improve battery life even further. Notably, Apple’s Pro devices have yet to use anything other than a Qualcomm modem, so we’ll have to see if that changes this year. Apple has its own Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chip, too: the N1. There’s little reason for Apple to move beyond the N1 yet—it already supports Bluetooth 6 and Wi-Fi 7. An N2 is not expected yet, but if Apple announced an N1X that improves power efficiency, we wouldn’t be surprised.

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Deal Days dropped this near-mint MacBook Pro refurb from $1,999 to $430
Macworld TL;DR: A Grade A refurbished MacBook Pro with 16GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD is on sale for $429.97 (reg. $1,999) through July 1. A new MacBook Pro starts well over $1,500, but the refurbished market sells the same hardware for a lot less. This Grade-A MacBook Pro with a 2GHz quad-core Intel i5, 16GB of RAM, and a 1TB SSD is in near-mint condition, but it’s still on sale for only $429.97 during Deal Days (reg. $1,999). This is the Touch Bar model with a 13.3-inch Retina display, True Tone for color matching to the room around you, and four Thunderbolt 3 ports that handle charging, fast file transfers, and external displays from one cable. The Magic Keyboard returned to a scissor switch design with this generation, so typing feels closer to a desktop than the older butterfly-key models. Touch ID lives at the top right for password-free logins. The Intel Core i5 chip turbo-boosts up to 3.8GHz, with Intel Iris Plus Graphics handling video playback, photo work, and lighter creative apps cleanly. 16GB of RAM keeps a stack of browser tabs, a document or two, and a video call open at the same time without slowing things down. 1TB of SSD storage covers a serious library of files and apps, and battery life runs up to 10 hours on a single charge. The machine ships with a charger included. July 1 at 11:59 p.m. PT is the cutoff to get a near-mint refurbished MacBook Pro on sale for $429.97. Check out the rest of the Deal Days Extended collection while you can. Apple MacBook Pro (2020) 13″ i5 2GHz Touchbar 16GB RAM 1TB SSD Space Gray (Refurbished)See Deal StackSocial prices subject to change.

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Claude Fable 5 cleared to return as US lifts Anthropic’s export control restriction
Anthropic has confirmed it will begin restoring access to Claude Fable 5 this Wednesday, July 1, nearly three weeks after US export controls forced the company to take the model offline. Here are the details.

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Claude Fable 5 cleared to return as US lifts Anthropic’s export control restriction
Anthropic has confirmed it will begin restoring access to Claude Fable 5 this Wednesday, July 1, nearly three weeks after US export controls forced the company to take the model offline. Here are the details.

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Claude Fable 5 cleared to return as US lifts Anthropic’s export control restriction
Anthropic has confirmed it will begin restoring access to Claude Fable 5 this Wednesday, July 1, nearly three weeks after US export controls forced the company to take the model offline. Here are the details.

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Tim Cook's government liaison position comes into focus before stepping down as Apple CEO
Apple CEO Tim Cook will soon be Executive Chairman and handle government interactions, but that isn't stopping him from taking a phone call today with a European Commission head over Apple AI in the EU.Apple CEO Tim Cook is ready to take on his role as government liaisonWWDC 2026 was focused on system optimization, child safety, and the new Apple Foundation Models. Apple Users in the EU were cut off completely from that last third of the keynote, as those features can't launch in the region as they exist today.According to a report from The Financial Times, first shared by 9to5Mac, Apple CEO Tim Cook had a virtual meeting with Henna Virkkunen, Executive Vice President of the European Commission, which reportedly was "constructive." People familiar with the exchange said that the conversation centered around how Apple might launch its revamped AI tools in the EU without violating the Digital Markets Act (DMA). Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

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Tim Cook and EU tech chief hold ‘constructive’ virtual meeting over Siri AI standoff
Earlier today, Tim Cook reportedly held “constructive” talks with EU tech chief Henna Virkkunen as Apple and the bloc sought a way forward in their dispute over the delayed launch of Siri AI in Europe. Here are the details.

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9to5Mac Daily: June 30, 2026 – iPhone 18 and Ultra rumors, more
Listen to a recap of the top stories of the day from 9to5Mac. 9to5Mac Daily is available on iTunes and Apple’s Podcasts app, Stitcher, TuneIn, Google Play, or through our dedicated RSS feed for Overcast and other podcast players. Sponsored by Backblaze: Backup you can rely on. Save 20% with code 9to5daily.

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US offers $10 million to identify hackers targeting Signal and WhatsApp users
The US State Department has announced a $10 million bounty for information that may help identify or locate members of two Russian state-backed hacking groups behind a campaign targeting Signal and WhatsApp users. Here are the details.

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American Express expands membership rewards points redemption with Apple Pay for U.S. card members
American Express is introducing seamless points redemption directly through Apple Pay checkouts. This update gives eligible U.S. Card… The post appeared first on MacDailyNews.

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OpenAI’s personal finance features for ChatGPT expands to more customers
June 30, 2026: Personal finance is now available to ChatGPT Plus customers in the U.S., expanding the feature from OpenAI’s $100/month plan to the $20/month version. Original story from last month is below. OpenAI is catching up with some competitors and offering new personal finance features inside ChatGPT. The new personal finance experience is rolling out starting today for some subscribers.

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Apple unveils new AI features for Creator Studio subscribers
Macworld Apple on Tuesday announced several new AI-based features for Apple Creator Studio, its suite of creative apps geared towards professionals. The apps getting the new features include Pixelmator Pro, Final Cut Pro, and Logic Pro. “Featuring new AI capabilities that are dynamic enough for every creative discipline, these updates make Apple Creator Studio even more connected, capable, and intelligent,” Apple said in a press release. Here are summaries of the new features for each app. Final Cut Pro Generate Captions: audio is automatically transcribed, and subtitles are placed directly in the timeline. They style, font, color, and text position can be customized. Edit Detection: can take rendered video, analyze it, and automatically split it back into the original clips on the timeline. Auto Mask (Mac): Ai is used to recognize items such as skin, hair, sky, and clothing without the need for manual tracking. Magnetic Mask (Mac): editors have complete control over exactly what to identify, track, and mask. Match Color (Mac): this feature has been revised so that it produces more accurate and natural color matches across a wider range of footage and lighting conditions. Advanced Trimming: fine-tune incoming and outgoing frames one at a time. Direct connection to Pixelmator Pro: users can send a frame and edit it for thumbnails, social media, etc. Motion Native support for SVG files: Also SVG scaling to any size while maintaining image quality Distribute Layers: faster setup of complex animations. New timeline controls: stagger, cascade, or reverse clips to build complex animations in seconds Compressor Immersive Metadata Viewer: view immersive, temporal, and dynamic metadata before encoding. 180-degree Apple Projected Media Profile: for Apple Vision Pro Anaglyph View for Stereoscopic Video Preview Final Cut Camera Clean HDMI Out: sends a pristine video signal to external monitors and recorders. Expanded ProRes support: includes ProRes LT. Disable digital zoom option: for using optical zoom Pixelmator Pro iWork integration: an image can be selected in a Pages, Keynote, or Numbers document, then opened directly in Pixelmator Pro for editing. Generate Shapes simplifies creating vector shapes needed to fit a project, where shapes are fully editable and can be saved to a dedicated collection for use later.  Logic Pro Chord ID: rebuilt so its harmonic analysis is more accurate. Producer Project “Shoulda Never”: complete session produced by Khris Riddick-Tynes. Granular sync mode: opens up entirely new dimensions of sound design (also available in Mainstage). Also, a new Granular Alchemy Sound Pack. Beat Breaker: new filter and pan modes and intuitive randomization controls. iWork updates Apple has also updated Pages, Keynote, and Numbers: Keynote: new transitions and builds. Pages on iPhone and iPad: adds Auto-Hyphenate and Show Invisibles. Numbers: adds ability to hide or color-code individual sheets.

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Apple Maps is currently down for some users [U]
Update, 5:23 p.m. ET: Apple says both issues have now been resolved. However, its System Status page now lists a partial outage affecting Maps Display, which may appear “slow or unavailable” for some users. Apple’s System Status page says two outages are affecting Apple Maps right now, one affecting search and the other affecting routing and navigation. Here are the details.

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Gemini Spark rolling out to macOS app for local tasks, automation
As previewed at I/O 2026, Gemini for macOS now supports Gemini Spark. This is the first of two big desktop app updates coming this summer, with the other being a new voice experience.

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MacBook Ultra could be very good news for MacBook Pro users
Rumors indicate Apple’s long-expected MacBook Pro redesign will be branded ‘MacBook Ultra’ instead. Here’s why this could be good news for MacBook Pro users in light of a previous redesign misstep.

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This iconic iPhone design will get closer to retirement with iPhone 18 Pro
Almost a decade ago, Apple introduced the iPhone X with what became an iconic design trait: the notch cutout. And this fall with iPhone 18 Pro, what’s now called the Dynamic Island is rumored to take a big step toward being retired.

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iPhone 18 Pro leaks: Qualcomm or Apple C2 model, A20 details, camera upgrades
After a closer look at some new data, Apple's iPhone 18 Pro modem situation may not be cut-and-dried. Here's what the latest leaks say is in store for cellular connectivity, the A20 chip, and possible camera improvements.New details about the iPhone 18 Pro have emerged, thanks to data leaked from Tata.On June 25, AppleInsider exclusively revealed that iPhone 18 Pro schematics and documents were among the more than 630GB of files taken from Tata in a cyberattack.An initial analysis of the leaked documentation uncovered Apple's plans to use its proprietary C2 modem in the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max. Additional details have since come to light, thanks to new research conducted by us and an analyst we've worked with in the past. Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

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Apple takes Epic fight over app store fees to the Supreme Court
Supreme Court will weigh if Apple contempt finding in Epic case is “erroneous.”

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Best Buy nabs retailer-exclusive Orange Beats Solo Buds
Apple subsidiary Beats by Dre has updated its Solo Buds with a new color, with consumers in the United States and Japan able to pick up a pair of bright orange earbuds from select retailers.Beats Solo Buds, but in OrangeOwners of Beats earbuds will be familiar with the blindingly bright orange colorway for some of its models. While you could get the Beats Powerbeats Pro 2 and Beats Powerbeats Fit in the colorway, you could only get the Beats Solo Buds in a few more muted colorways.Fans of the safety-inspired color choice will now be able to complete their collection with an orange color option of Solo Buds. However, they are only available through specific retailers. Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

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Threads adds translation to Live Chats and expands chat creation to more users
Threads is rolling out several updates to Live Chats, including translation support, new moderation tools, and expanded access for Community Champions. Here are the details.

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