iPhone 17 Air has iPhone 17 Pro perf: binned A19 Pro chip has less GPU cores, lower gaming FPS

Apple's upcoming ultra-thin iPhone 17 Air smartphone won't just be the thinnest iPhone ever, it'll also have a binned A19 Pro chip inside, the same SoC inside the iPhone 17 Pro, but with less GPU cores.

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In new leaks from Weibo-based tipster "Fixed Focus Digital", the new iPhone 17 Air is indeed powered by Apple's new in-house A19 Pro chip, but in "binned form". Binned chips are ones that have just barely missed silicon perfection, so they get cut down and used in different products down the stack. Intel, AMD, NVIDIA and many other chipmakers do this with their GPUs and CPUs during production.

This means that the A19 Pro destined for the iPhone 17 Air will feature a 5-core GPU, which is one less GPU core than the iPhone 17 Pro will house with the same A19 Pro chip. One less GPU core won't result in too much gaming performance lost on the iPhone 17 Air, but it will make it just slower than the slightly higher-end iPhone 17 Pro.

There are other factors on the slightly gimped A19 Pro for the iPhone 17 Air, is that the new ultra-thin smartphone could feature sub-par thermal management, so with a single less GPU core the binned A19 Pro SoC inside of the iPhone 17 Air should run cooler. The thinner chassis would also lead to thermal-related decreases in performance of the iPhone 17 Air, or at least quicker, than the thicker iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max smartphones.

Apple is reportedly using a vapor chamber with a thin copper plate inside of the higher-end iPhone 17 Pro that will reduce heating, and enhancing performance during heavy workloads, something you can read more about in the story linked below.

The use of a vapor chamber cooling system inside of the iPhone 17 Pro could be fantastic for editing and especially gaming, keeping the CPU and GPU clocks maxed out, instead of throttling and reducing performance. Apple's next-gen A19 Pro chip should stay cool and pump more performance than ever before, which I'm sure we're going to hear all about when the company unleashes its new iPhone 17 Pro