The A20 chip that’s expected to be used in Apple’s upcoming iPhone 18 lineup may be attached to a price tag that’s almost double that of the A 19 chip used in the iPhone 17 lineup.
The A20 chip is expected to be built using TSMC’s 2-nanometer process, which provides impressive performance and efficiency gains but results in higher manufacturing costs and tighter production constraints.
Supply-chain reporting indicates the A20 chip could be priced as high as $280 per unit, roughly 80% higher than the A20.
While Apple has traditionally accepted the higher costs to secure access to bleeding-edge chips, the 5-nanometer and 3-nanometer transitions haven’t had cost increases of the A20’s expected magnitude.
2-nonometer production is expected to have extremely-higher costs attached, as the first-generation of yields are fragile, while advanced packaging and quickly rising memory costs are pushing costs ever higher.
While we have seen previous Apple chip transitions provide improvements, the 2-nanometer node introduces nanosheet, or gate-all-around, transistors, which while improving power efficiency and transistor density are harder to manufacture reliably at scale.
