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Apple Intelligence was well received at WWDC 2024, but it was a bit disappointing to discover that the only Apple smartphones that will be able to use it at launch will be the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max. But new interviews with three Apple executives shed more light on why only Apple’s newest and most expensive iPhones will be able to use Apple Intelligence.
Daring Fireball’s John Gruber, speaking with Apple’s John Giannandrea, Craig Federighi, and Greg Joswiak during a live recording of the podcast, asked about Apple’s decision to limit the device compatibility for Apple Intelligence to its current setting (1:20:08 if you want to skip to a specific moment). Giannandrea, Apple’s senior vice president of machine learning and AI strategy, responded that older, less powerful iPhones can run Apple Intelligence, but they just aren’t fast enough.
“Inference on large language models is very computationally expensive. In theory, you could run these models on very old devices, but they would be so slow that it would be useless,” Giannandrea said.
When Gruber directly asked the panel if the discontinuation of Apple Intelligence was “a ploy to sell new iPhones,” Joswiak (Apple’s SVP of Worldwide Marketing) responded that if you have an iPad or Mac with an M-series chip (the oldest being the MacBook Air M1, released in 2020), that shows that Apple Intelligence compatibility is hardware-based and not a ploy to get people to upgrade.
Federighi, senior vice president of software engineering, added that “our first effort is to figure out how to bring back as much functionality as possible.”
“It’s pretty amazing to run a model of this power on an iPhone, but it turns out that’s what was needed to build this iPhone.”
More RAM and bigger NPUs are key
When pressed for further details, Federighi said Apple Intelligence compatibility depends on “many aspects of the system,” with “RAM being one of those elements.”
The importance of RAM capacity to run Apple Intelligence has already been hinted at by analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, who noted that the minimum requirement for a compatible Apple device appears to be 8GB of RAM. The only iPhone models with that much RAM are, you guessed it, the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max.
Giannandrea also pointed out that Apple’s in-house NPU, the Neural Engine, is a major factor. “The A17 Pro (the chip in the iPhone 15 Pro) is not the first A chip with a Neural Engine, but it has a much larger Neural Engine than previous chips.” Specifically, the A17 Pro’s Neural Engine has a performance of 35 TOPS (Tera/Trillion Operations per Second), a significant increase over the 17 TOPS of the A16 Bionic chip used in the base iPhone 15 and iPhone 14 Pro.
The silver lining for owners of older iPhones is that other new features announced as part of iOS 18 will also work on older iPhones, such as 2018’s iPhone XS and iPhone XR. These include greater home screen and lock screen customizability, the ability to hide and lock apps, a wider range of text formatting options for Messages, a new design for the Photos app, and more.
Expect all iPhone 16 models (due for release in September this year) to be able to use Apple Intelligence, as all models are rumored to use sufficient RAM and a sufficiently advanced chipset.
But anyone wanting to upgrade their iPhone this year to take full advantage of Apple Intelligence, already confirmed to be coming this fall, may need to buy the iPhone 16 Pro or iPhone 16 Pro Max to ensure full compatibility.
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