Apple Intelligence was revealed in front of the world at the WWDC 2024 this month and there has been a lot of talk about Apple’s AI tech and who will get to use them. It has been made abundantly clear that only if you own the iPhone 15 Pro or higher models you can use the AI features from the company. But until now we were waiting for Apple to spill the beans and tell us the main reason for this limitation.
After all, the iPhone 15 and 15 Plus are powered by an equally powerful A16 Bionic chipset, why can’t it possibly run these AI tools? The company executives have shared the details in a talk show from the WWDC 2024 which has come out this week.
Apple’s Reason for AI Feature Support For Few iPhones
The video covers a wide range of topics but the biggest question we had to focus on is related to the Apple Intelligence features. Could old iPhones also run the AI tools that were showcased earlier this month? Apple executives John Giannandrea, Greg Joswiak, and Craig Federighi who divided the focus with their field of expertise.
“When you run these models at runtime, it’s called inference, and the inference of large language models is incredibly computationally expensive. It’s a combination of bandwidth in the device, the size of the Apple Neural Engine, and the device’s power to run these models quickly enough to be useful,” as highlighted by Giannandrea in the video. He went on to add that, “You could, in theory, run these models on a very old device, but it would be so slow that it would not be useful,” which answers the basic question of these limitations and is there is a sinister thought for this move.
Various analysts have hinted that the AI move from Apple could be a masterstroke as more people look to make the iPhone upgrades, does the company agree to these views? “No, not at all. Otherwise, we would have been smart enough just to do our most recent iPads and Macs too, wouldn’t we?,” it was Greg Joswiak from the marketing team to share his views.
Making More Sense Of The Decision
But we still don’t get a credible reason, at least from the hardware point of view, until Federighi decides to join the conversation and share his technical insight into Apple Intelligence and what it needs to really show the best results. He does mention that Apple wants and tries to bring all the features to older iPhones, and in most cases it does. But Apple Intelligence is a different kettle of fish which needs specific hardware to run.
Then he points out that the A17 Pro chipset with 8GB RAM is the ideal combo to make the AI features work seamlessly. The hardware running on the 15 Pro and 15 Pro Max comes with a 16-core Neural Engine which you don’t with the A16 Bionic running on the iPhone 15 and Plus models. Similarly, you need the M-series powered Macs or iPads to run the AI features that also come with 8GB memory out of the box.
Having said that, we expect Apple to bring the A17 Pro to all the iPhone 16 series models later this year, which means you won’t have to spend big and get the iPhone 15 Pro to use the Apple Intelligence features.
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