Apple’s A18 Pro vs A19 Pro story just got a lot more interesting, and it has less to do with raw chip design and more to do with something far simpler: cooling.
Both the A18 Pro and A19 Pro are built on TSMC’s 3nm manufacturing process, but the newer A19 Pro benefits from a refined node shrink that helps Apple squeeze out extra efficiency and performance. On paper, that should give the iPhone 17-era hardware an easy win. In real-world testing, though, one iPhone 16 Pro Max owner has shown that the gap may not be as large as many people assume—especially when thermal limits are taken out of the equation.
A Reddit user named VenZoah shared Geekbench 6 results from an iPhone 16 Pro Max running the A18 Pro while being actively cooled. With improved temperatures, the device posted a single-core score of 3,630 and a multi-core score of 9,638. The claim was bold: that an A19 Pro configuration found in the iPhone Air, featuring a 6-core CPU and 5-core GPU, could actually end up slower in certain scenarios.
Checking the Geekbench 6 results for the iPhone Air backs up that argument. The iPhone Air’s A19 Pro recorded a single-core score of 3,687 and a multi-core score of 9,390. That means the A19 Pro remains slightly ahead in single-core performance, but the actively cooled A18 Pro overtakes it in multi-core workloads—an area where heat and sustained boosting make a major difference.
Here’s how the comparison shakes out:
Actively cooled iPhone 16 Pro Max (A18 Pro)
Single-core: 3,630
Multi-core: 9,638
Internally cooled iPhone Air (A19 Pro)
Single-core: 3,687
Multi-core: 9,390
What makes this especially notable is how close the single-core numbers are. They’re near enough that most users wouldn’t feel a difference day-to-day, while the multi-core advantage swings toward the older flagship when it can maintain lower temperatures.
This naturally fuels a bigger discussion around Apple’s thermal design choices. If the iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max had included more advanced cooling—such as a vapor chamber—there’s a strong chance they could have delivered performance much closer to the next generation during sustained workloads and benchmarks like Geekbench 6. The results suggest that the A18 Pro isn’t necessarily “far behind” the A19 Pro; it’s often simply constrained by heat.
There’s also additional evidence that aggressive cooling solutions can dramatically improve sustained performance on Apple’s top-end iPhones. In another demonstration, Apple’s current flagship hardware reportedly achieved around 90 percent performance stability in the 3DMark Steel Nomad Light test when multiple desktop M.2 SSD coolers were attached to the back of the phone. As unconventional as that sounds, it reinforces the same takeaway: iPhone performance can be heavily limited by thermal headroom, and better cooling can unlock more consistent results.
Ultimately, this comparison highlights an overlooked reality of smartphone performance in 2025: the chipset matters, but cooling can matter just as much. For anyone tracking iPhone benchmarks, A18 Pro vs A19 Pro isn’t just a generational story—it’s a thermal one.
