Apple announced the M6 chip last week, just ahead of its September iPhone event, providing the clearest indication yet of what the A20 will bring to the iPhone 18 lineup. Apple silicon generations share much of their architecture across the A-series and the M-series, so a new A-series chip normally functions as a partial preview of the M-series chip that follows it. This year the order reversed; the M6 was revealed on August 25, ahead of the A20 Pro expected in the iPhone 18 Pro this month.
I wonder why we’re being so slow about introducing AV1 encoding. I’ve switched to it entirely since moving to Linux, and the format really feels miraculous, such a big leap in quality and compression. And it’s not like Apple has ever been hesitant about messing things up for older hardware by making a technical leap forward, how many generations of Apple hardware must support AV1 decoding before they’ll start saving videos in it automatically?