It looks like the iPhone 16 Pro and Pro Max smartphones will differ in their platform from their predecessors much more than several past generations. It's all about artificial intelligence.
According to Economic Daily News, Apple's A18 platform will have a significantly improved NPU. And it will really be needed, as iOS 18 is expected to get a lot of new AI-powered features.
Of course, we don’t yet know what these functions will be and how much they will be tied to processing locally on the SoC, but in a certain case it may turn out that older new generation iPhones will work much better in a number of tasks than younger new products and predecessors.
The source speaks similarly about the Apple M4 SoC for Mac, but here you need to understand that the M4 line will include several platforms with completely different numbers of CPU and GPU cores, so on the Mac the influence of the NPU unit may not be as strong as on the iPhone.