“In March, Apple intends to announce an updated iPad and smaller-screen iPhone featuring the latest A9x and A9 chips,” Brad Stone, Adam Satariano, and Gwen Ackerman report for Bloomberg Businessweek, citing “a person familiar with the plans, who wasn’t authorized to comment publicly.”
“If accurate, the information would reveal that the new 4-inch iPhone, rumored to be called the ‘iPhone 5se’ or ‘iPhone 6c,’ will be more powerful than Apple’s current mid-range handset lineup, the iPhone 6 series,” Neil Hughes reports for AppleInsider. “Priced starting at $549, the iPhone 6 runs an A8 processor with 1 gigabyte of RAM.”
“The A9 chip in the iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus, meanwhile, has 2 gigabytes of RAM, allowing app data to remain active in the background for longer. The A9 is more than 50 percent faster than the A8 at multicore operations, and nearly 60 percent faster at single core tasks,” Hughes reports. “As for the third-generation iPad Air, the A9X processor found in the iPad Pro is a dual-core CPU with a 12-cluster GPU. The beefed-up chip doubles the graphics power of the base A9 processor found in the iPhone 6s series. The A9X also boasts 4 gigabytes of RAM, doubling the amount of memory in the iPad Air 2 and iPhone 6s.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: If accurate, all the more reason why Apple would be smart to not use a “5” anywhere in the name of their new 4-inch iPhone.
Meanwhile, it sounds like iPad Air 3 is going to be the powerful, full-featured tablet for which many have been waiting!