I suppose its a good thing there are 1.5 million iPhone Air units that went unsold that use a A19 5 core CPU. Even better, iPhone Air had 12GB RAM onboard. With unsold product and current RAM drought, this would be a good way to turn unsold product into something consumers really want.
Here's a reference on the iPhone air internals from Jan 2026:
"Possibly the biggest hurt could be with the chips. Apple uses the same A19 Pro CPU in the Air as it does with the iPhone 17 Pro. But the Air has only 5 GPU cores — as does the base iPhone 17 — while the iPhone 17 Pro has 6 GPU cores. (To be blunt, this is merely chip binning, not a new chip)."
"As a result, the unused Air chips cannot be put in the the lower-end base iPhone 17 nor in the higher-end iPhone 17 Pro. They cannot be repurposed. Even worse, the Air has 12GB of DRAM while the baseline iPhone 17 has just 8GB, according to TrendForce. So, any processor modules which have already had their DRAM fused onto the CPU would also result in wasted DRAM — unless Apple and TSMC find some magical way to “unfuse” the memory from the base die."
source