Introduction

At its Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) 2024, Apple unveiled a suite of artificial intelligence features collectively called Apple Intelligence. These AI-powered features will be available on devices with Apple A17 Pro and M1 chips and onwards, limiting them to iPhone 15 Pro models in the current lineup. Future iPhones will support these features, but older models and baseline iPhone 15 models are excluded. Why?

Hardware Requirements

According to a report by Fonearena, during a talk show at Apple’s annual developers conference, Apple’s software engineering chief, Craig Federighi, explained that Apple Intelligence features require specific hardware to function correctly. The iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max are powered by the A17 Pro chip, which features a 16-core Neural engine designed to handle AI workloads. Compared to the Neural engine on the A16 bionic chip, which powers the vanilla iPhone 15 models, the A17 Pro offers more processing power. Federighi also mentioned that all Apple Intelligence compatible devices need at least 8GB RAM, which is crucial for running AI tasks.

Older Devices

Older generation Apple devices are not completely incapable of running AI models. During the talk show, Apple’s head of the machine learning department, John Giannandrea, said, “You could, in theory, run these models on a very old device, but it would be so slow that it would not be useful.” He explained that inference, the process of running a large language model (LLM), is “incredibly computationally expensive” and depends on “a combination of bandwidth in the device” along with the size of the Neural Engine.

Marketing Strategy?

When asked if limiting Apple Intelligence to recent iPhones is part of a plan to boost sales of newer and more expensive iPhone models, Greg Joswiak, Apple’s marketing chief, denied it. He stated, “If that would have been the case, we would have been smart enough just to do our most recent iPads and Macs too, wouldn’t we?”

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