SAN JOSE, Calif. — Apple announced a family of three iPhones powered by a 7nm SoC enabling up to 512 GBytes of memory. The handsets range in starting prices from $749 to $1,099, increase battery life by 30 to 90 minutes, and ship within two to six weeks.

The smartphones, and two new models of the Apple Watch, generally packed larger screens and upgraded chips, in some cases in slightly smaller devices. None of the devices support 5G cellular networks, expected to start switching on later this year, but the handsets support Gbit/s data rates, an LTE capability that Qualcomm was early to support.

Apple’s 7nm A12 Bionic chip packs 6.9 billion transistors and is “the most powerful chip in a smartphone,” said chief executive Tim Cook.

The A12’s two high-performance CPU cores deliver 15% more speed and 40% greater efficiency than the prior A11. Four other cores are 50% more efficient than those on the prior chip. The 10-nm A11 was touted as sporting up to 25% more performance and 70% more efficiency than its predecessor, reinforcing reports that the 7-nm node delivers declining advantages.

The A12 packs a six-core GPU designed by Apple, said to be 50% faster than the block on the A11. An upgraded neural engine sports eight cores, up from two in the A11. Apple claims that it delivers a nine-fold performance gain on its CoreML machine-learning framework, hitting 5 trillion operations/s, up from 600 billion ops/s on the A11 using one-tenth of the energy.

The performance will speed a variety of operations, including unlocking the phone using Apple’s facial-recognition software. It also enables a new capability to group multiple Siri functions into shortcuts.

Third-party developers showed applications using Apple’s CoreML and ARKit 2 frameworks to enable new features supported by neural nets. They included Homecourt, an app tracking six metrics of basketball performance in real time, as well as new features in mobile games using augmented reality.

“The A12 is a game changer,” said Tim Bajarin, a veteran Apple watcher and president of Creative Strategies. “Five trillion transactions per second will drive more powerful neural network and AI functions, making these new iPhones the most powerful smartphones on the market.”

The new handsets use 6.5- and 5.8-inch OLED displays supporting 458 pixels/inch and a 6.1-inch LCD on a low-end model supporting 326 pixels/inch. The iPhone XS and XS Max include dual 12-Mpixel-wide and telephoto cameras while the low-end XR uses a single 12-Mpixel camera.

All of the cameras support a variety of features, including HDR10 and adjustable depth-of-field, relying on an image processor and the neural engine in the A12. “This is a new era of computational photography,” said Phil Schiller, Apple’s vice president of marketing.

Analysts at Nomura expressed surprise at handset ASPs rising–in part due to a new 512 GByte option–to $800-$830, above estimates of $760-$780. The $1,000 iPhone X and similar Samsung models are seeing lower unit sales, Nomura noted.

Handset prices will rise again next year to make up for the need for 5G chips. Nomura believes the latest handsets will use Skywork's RF chips for LTE low bands and a mix of Qorvo and Broadcom RF chips in mid- and high-end bands.

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