iPhone 15 will get upgrade that could give a hint of the Apple Vision Pro, report claims

New features will help build ecosystem around upcoming headset

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Apple’s new iPhone 15 will feature at least one new upgrade aimed at the upcoming Vision Pro headset, according to a report.

The new iPhone is due out in September, and Apple has said little about it. But as the release nears, more reports are leaking out from the company’s supply chain that indicate its features.

One of those may be a new “ultra wide band” or UWB chip that is looking ahead to Apple’s Vision Pro, according to a new report from reputable analyst Ming-chi Kuo.

The chip will allow the phone and the headset to be able to work together, he suggested, as part of a “more competitive ecosystem”.

“The ecosystem is one of the key success factors for Vision Pro, including the integration with other Apple hardware products, and related main hardware specifications are Wi-Fi and UWB,” he wrote on a post on Twitter.

“iPhone 15 will likely see an specification upgrade of UWB, with the production process moving from 16nm to more advanced 7nm, allowing for improved performance or reduced power consumption for nearby Interactions.”

The U1 chip is used give the iPhone and other devices better spatial awareness, so that they can find other objects more precisely.

It is not clear what features that integration may provide for either the iPhone or the Vision Pro. Mr Kuo’s reports tend to focus on leaks from Apple’s hardware pipeline, rather than its software, so tend to reveal more about the physical nature of a product rather than how exactly it will be used.

Apple’s U1 UWB chip first arrived in the iPhone 11, and has been in every iPhone since. It has rolled out more widely, to the Watch and HomePod as well as the AirTags and AirPods Pro.

Initially, it was somewhat unclear what Apple intended to the U1 chip to do. But over time it released a number of products – such as those AirTags and AirPods Pro – which can be found with the phone, and rely on the UWB for more precise location.

Mr Kuo also indicated that next year’s phone, the iPhone 16, will come with a new WiFi chip that will be “more conducive to Apple’s integration of hardware products running on the same local network and provide a better ecosystem experience”.