A-Series Chip
The A-Series chip is the central computing component that Apple designs itself for iPhones and some iPads. It combines a main processor, a graphics unit, and its own compute part for AI tasks on a single piece of silicon.
Inside every smartphone sits a small piece of silicon that handles all the computing work. It launches apps, draws the image on the screen, and processes photos. Apple has this component designed in-house for its iPhones and calls the lineup A-Series. Each individual model gets a consecutive number, such as A17 Pro or A18. A new generation appears every year, usually alongside the new iPhone. The chips themselves are not manufactured by Apple, but by a factory in Taiwan.
Why Apple builds its own chips
Until 2010, Apple bought its chips from outside companies. That meant the company got the same component as its competitors. With the A4 in the first iPad, Apple began using its own designs. The advantage lies in the fact that hardware and software come from the same house. Apple can tailor the chip precisely to its operating system, and vice versa.
The result is especially visible in energy efficiency. An iPhone with a comparatively small battery often lasts longer than competing devices with a bigger battery. The reason isn’t magic, but coordination: the chip handles typical tasks using less power because it was built specifically for those tasks.
Economically, the A-Series is one reason for Apple’s high profits. Whoever designs the most important component themselves is less dependent on suppliers and their prices. Other manufacturers usually buy their chips from Qualcomm or MediaTek. That’s precisely why A-chips regularly show up in business news.
What’s packed onto the chip
An A-Series chip isn’t a single computer, but an entire bundle of specialists. The most important part is the CPU, the general computing unit for programs of all kinds. Alongside it sits the GPU, which computes images and game graphics. A third part, the Neural Engine, is tailored to AI tasks, such as recognizing faces in photos. This design is called a system-on-a-chip, because almost the entire computer sits on one piece of silicon.
The CPU consists of several cores, meaning several separate computing units. Some are designed for speed, others for efficiency. When scrolling through a news feed, only the efficient cores are working. When a demanding game starts, the fast ones kick in as well. This division of labor is one of the main reasons for the long battery life.
A second lever is manufacturing. The structures on the chip get smaller with each generation, measured in nanometers. Smaller means more components in the same area and less power consumption per computing step. The A17 Pro was the first phone chip in 2023 built on a three-nanometer process. Only a handful of factories worldwide can even deliver such leaps.
From the iPhone to the financial news
Anyone using an iPhone is using an A-Series chip without ever seeing it. It becomes visible indirectly: when the camera instantly brightens a photo, or when the keyboard suggests words. These computations run on the device itself, not on some external server. That’s a selling point for privacy, since the data never leaves the phone.
A common misconception is that A-chips and M-chips are the same thing. The M-Series sits in Macs and larger iPads and is essentially a beefed-up variant of the same design. Both trace back to the ARM architecture, a blueprint that Apple uses under license. The difference lies mainly in size, performance, and power consumption.
In the news, you typically encounter the term in the fall, when Apple unveils new iPhones. Comparisons are then made about how much faster the new generation computes. Just as often, it’s about manufacturing at TSMC in Taiwan and political risks in the region. Because if production there stalls, it affects not just Apple, but half the tech industry.