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Comment by buildbot | Hacker News Reader

USB-2 is integrated into the A16 SoC - not USB3.

USB3 / USB 4 was enabled with an external chip in select iPads. This has a power, space, and material cost. It may not even fit in the phone space or power budget at all.

For the A17, they added USB3 to the SoC. I bet the iPhone 16 non pro will have USB3, when it gets the a17 chip.

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One thing that a lot of people are missing is that the iPhone 15 Pro is using the "A17 Pro" SoC. It'll be interesting to see if the base iPhone 16 will also have the Pro SoC or if they'll be using a non-Pro version.

Will the non-Pro version also be 3nm? Will it support USB3?

Following the same pattern they’ve used for a while, the older phone will get the same A17 chip. The special high performance X/Z stuff was always for the iPad line only. I am not aware of any special “pro” only a series chip.

We’ll see. Per an other user, the iPad Air is capable of full usb4 / TB but is software locked to 10Gb for segmentation, so that’s hardly unimaginable. Especially if they consider modern transfer speeds to be related to direct ProRes streaming.

Maybe, I’d like to see some sources that the chip is actually the same as what they use in the pro iPads.

It also could be heat related in the iPad Air, it has a thinner and lighter chassis with less metal. Thunderbolt uses a fair bit of power at 40Gb/s! Let alone say, providing 15w of power to whatever device like an external SSD.

> Maybe, I’d like to see some sources that the chip is actually the same as what they use in the pro iPads.

https://www.apple.com/ipad/compare/?modelList=ipad-pro-12-9-...

Scroll to the "chip" section, and straight from the horse's mouth they both use a 4+4 / 8 M1, I rather doubt Apple has a variant of that chip which removes ip blocks (AFAIK the only variant is the 4+4 / 7 chip still available on the super low end MBA).

> It also could be heat related in the iPad Air

That... does not in any way affect the point?

Can the M1 do thunderbolt without any other chip? That’s not clear on the spec sheet, you’d need a teardown.

> That... does not in any way affect the point?

Okay…you’re right, the only reason I don’t have a 128 core epyc cpu in my iPad is market segmentation! Darn markets.

> Can the M1 do thunderbolt without any other chip?

Yes. Per Apple:

> More Innovative Technologies Packed into M1

> An Apple-designed Thunderbolt controller with support for USB 4, transfer speeds up to 40Gbps, and compatibility with more peripherals than ever.

> you’d need a teardown.

You mean like the dozens of teardowns of M1 macs when it was released, which only found retimers on the motherboard but no external controller?

> Okay…you’re right, the only reason I don’t have a 128 core epyc cpu in my iPad is market segmentation! Darn markets.

I see you are wilfully obtuse and entirely unserious. I'm sorry I bothered.

> You mean like the dozens of teardowns of M1 macs when it was released, which only found retimers on the motherboard but no external controller?

Thanks for the info!

> I see you are wilfully obtuse and entirely unserious. I'm sorry I bothered.

No, you are being an asshole and a bit of idiot. I said it might be heat related - so there is a reason beyond market segmentation that apple does not include thunderbolt in the iPad air. I don't know why I am bothering either, but here we are.

Source?

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