- The mobile phones that will be supported by Apple's next-generation AI system, “Apple Intelligence,” are the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max.
- Apple's head of AI, John Giannandrea, said older iPhones can't keep up with the computing demands of AI.
- Apple Intelligence is expected to be released this fall alongside iOS 18 and the new iPhone 16 lineup.
Why can't you run Apple's cool new AI features (collectively known as Apple Intelligence) on older iPhones? According to Apple, it's not a good time.
The company has limited its long-awaited AI generation system to its latest iPhones (iPhone 15 Pro, iPhone 15 Pro Max, and the upcoming lineup, likely called iPhone 16), but the good news is that it's available to more Mac and iPad models. All you need is an iPad or Mac with an M1 chip, so any model released in recent years will work.
in An interview with John Gruber on the podcast “The Talk Show” Speaking after Apple's WWDC last week, John Giannandrea, Apple's head of AI strategy and machine learning, explained that while AI models could theoretically run on older devices, they would be “so slow that they would be useless.”
Giannandrea said the strict restrictions on the iPhone aren't arbitrary restrictions aimed at boosting smartphone sales.
“Otherwise, they would have been perfectly smart to just make the modern iPad and Mac,” Apple CMO Greg Joswiak added.
According to Giannandrea, Apple's latest A17 chip is the ideal hardware to run Apple Intelligence thanks to ANE. [Apple Neural Engine].
“Inference on large language models is incredibly computationally expensive,” he says, “so making these models run fast enough to be practical is a combination of device bandwidth, ANE size, and device power.”
The latest iPhones also have more RAM, or memory, which is also a key factor in running generative AI features on the device.
“The biggest constraint in running these models is memory,” tech analyst Ben Thompson previously told Business Insider's Peter Kafka, “and all devices that support this have a minimum of 8 gigabytes of RAM. That's the gist of it.”
While Apple says discontinuing Apple Intelligence on the iPhone isn't an attempt to boost sales, it may need additional incentives to convince customers to upgrade their older devices. iPhone sales decline That was up 10% year over year in the first quarter, and data shows people are hanging on to their iPhones for longer.
The Apple Intelligence features will be free to users and will roll out alongside iOS 18 and the new iPhone lineup in the fall.
