The iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max will be able to run Apple Intelligence features, but no other current phone can handle the upcoming AI-powered features. Apple’s reasons for the limitation seem somewhat vague, at least so far. They don’t fully explain why a 2-year-old iPhone chip isn’t up to the job but a 4-year-old Mac chip is.
As it stands, some people harbor suspicions that it’s an attempt to force iPhone users to upgrade to the latest models this fall. And some iPhone 15 owners are angry that their relatively new devices won’t be able to take advantage of Apple Intelligence.
Cult of Mac asked Apple to explain the decision but we didn’t hear back. So, I’ll do what Apple hasn’t: Go through a range of hardware features and explore what role they might play in keeping Apple AI off so many iPhones.
We need a better explanation of why older iPhones can’t handle Apple Intelligence
Apple Intelligence — a suite of AI features coming later this year to iPhone, Mac and iPad — stole the spotlight during the company’s recent developer’s conference. It will give compatible Apple devices the ability to generate images and custom emoji, expand their written communications with AI-powered writing tools and more.
The Apple Intelligence announcement gave Cupertino’s stock a boost, because it showed the company has a plan for bringing AI features to its devices. But news that only handsets running the Apple A17 Pro processor can access these features caused a furor among some Apple fans, because that restriction excludes the basic iPhone 15 and 15 Plus from last year, as well as every older iOS model.
Suddenly, people with iPhones less than a year old felt ripped off because their devices just weren’t worthy of Apple’s upcoming AI capabilities.
“Not including the regular iPhone 15 in Apple’s AI capabilities is a great way to really piss off your best customers!” wrote @hamids on X. “This is a HUGE miss on Apple’s part.”
Apple provides imprecise reasons
In the time since, Apple executives tried to explain. In a live interview the week of WWDC24, The Talk Show‘s John Gruber asked John Giannandrea, Apple’s senior vice president of machine learning and AI strategy, about limiting Apple Intelligence to iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max.
“These [large language] models, when you run them at run times, it’s called inference, and the inference of large language models is incredibly computationally expensive,” Giannandrea replied. “And so it’s a combination of bandwidth in the device, it’s the size of the ANE [Apple Neural Engine], it’s the oomph in the device, to actually do these models fast enough to be useful. You could in theory run these models on a very old device but it would be so slow that it would not be useful.”
You must admit that “the oomph in the device” is an imprecise phrase. So I asked Apple for something more specific. I’d like to know what minimal combination of features is necessary to handle Apple Intelligence. I have not yet heard back.
Is it all about the Apple Neural Engine?
Giannandrea specifically mentioned Apple’s Neural Engine plays a role in limiting the company’s best AI features to two handsets. At first glance, that makes a lot of sense. The whole purpose of the Neural Engine is to handle AI tasks, and the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max are the only ones with the A17 Pro processor. As Apple said when the chip launched, “the Neural Engine is now up to 2x faster.” To get specific, the A16 Bionic in the basic iPhone 15 offers up to 17 trillion operations per second, aka TOPS, while the A17 Pro offers up to 35 TOPS.
That would seem to solve the mystery except … the M1 chip from way back in 2020 also can handle Apple Intelligence, and its Neural Engine maxes out at 11 TOPS. If that was all it took, then the A14 Bionic in the iPhone 12 could handle Apple Intelligence.
CPU speed might play a role
The A17 Pro in the top-tier iPhones gives them a Geekbench multicore score of about 7,200, while the A16 Bionic scores around 6,500. But even the basic M1 scores about 8,300 on the same test — that makes it 28% faster than the A16. It’s possible the lack of CPU speed in the older iPhone processor keeps it from running Apple Intelligence.
RAM seems to play a critical part
Unconfirmed reports indicate there’s a minimal amount of RAM needed for Apple Intelligence. Supposedly, Apple’s large language model needs a couple of gigabytes of RAM to run.
iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max models come with 8GB of RAM. And that’s apparently critical. “The tech giant determined internally months ago that 8 gigabytes is the minimum needed to run Apple Intelligence,” Bloomberg‘s Mark Gurman recently leaked. The basic iPhone 15 and 15 Plus come with only 6GB of RAM, as do all the iPhone 14 versions.
Giannandrea also motioned bandwidth. But both the A17 Pro and A16 Bionic boast a maximum memory bandwidth of 51.2 gigabytes per second.
So what is it?
When Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, was asked at WWDC24 if Apple Intelligence depended more on the Neural Engine or RAM or something else, he said, “It’s many dimensions of the system — RAM is one of the pieces of the total.” And that’s the best answer Apple has given. There’s some mystery combination of Neural Engine, CPU speed, RAM, etc., that’s capable of handling Apple’s advanced AI features. Nothing else makes the cut.
2020’s M1 chip and its successors fall on one side of the line. That’s good news for buyers of any Apple silicon Mac. The same goes for iPad Pro and iPad Air models released in the past few years. But the only iPhone chip that makes the grade is the A17 Pro. And that’s the source of frustration — especially for those using an $800 iPhone 15 released only nine months ago.
These people would like something more specific about why such a new handset can’t handle Apple Intelligence. Especially since an M-series chip that’s apparently inferior in a number of ways can. If the requirements for acceptable performance are 8GB of RAM, a Neural Engine that can do 11 TOPS, and a CPU that’s nearly as fast as the M1, then Apple should say that. Stop being vague.
Apparently not a trick
The lack of clarity makes some people suspicious. During his The Talk Show Live event during WWDC24, Gruber asked if the Apple Intelligence cutoff is just a scheme to sell more iPhones. Greg Joswiak, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing denied that it is.
“No, not at all,” Joswiak said. “Otherwise, we would have been smart enough just to do recent iPads and Macs, too, wouldn’t we?”
To Joswiak’s point, while Apple Intelligence requires iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max (or any of the four iPhone 16 models expected this fall), it will run on the MacBook Pro from 2020 and even the iPad Air from 2022.
Still, those who don’t own one of those computers, or simply want to use Apple Intelligence on their new or newish iPhone, would appreciate more details on why they are being left out in the cold.
