Forget the iPhone 15 Pro's A17 Pro chip, Apple's tipped for new 2nm silicon as soon as 2026

Apple announced the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max during its September 12 event and the new models will finally go on sale on September 22. When they do they'll be the first phones with a 3nm chip installed, bringing improved performance to people who pick those handsets up. But it seems that Apple is already working on what comes next and one analyst believes that it might arrive sooner than you'd think.

This is all according to the supply chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo who is normally pretty good at predicting things based on what suppliers tell him. In a larger Medium post Kuo says that TSMC is already working on what will be the next big upgrade to its chips, with Apple being one of the two companies that will benefit greatly from the move.

Kuo says that he expects that Apple and NVIDIA will be the two companies most likely to make use of TSMC's chips first. For Apple, Kup expects the iPhone to switch to new 2nm chips as soon as 2026 while Intel is set to do the same for its own next-generation AI chips.

That doesn't mean that we won't see a new chip used in Apple's devices before then, but they'll likely be tweaked versions of the A17 Pro that debuts in the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max. We can also expect that these new 2nm chips will also be used in Macs in the future, although Kuo didn't mention when that might happen.

A move to a smaller manufacturing process doesn't automatically make the new chips faster, but it should allow them to run cooler and use less power - two thnigs that can in turn allow Apple to run these new chips faster.