The official reason why you need the latest iPhone to run Apple Intelligence has finally been revealed and it’s what I said it was.
It All Boils Down to Compute Power and RAM, and the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max has All of it
Apple Intelligence is an amazing leap for iPhone, iPad and Mac. But the moment I saw the list of devices that support the feature, it really had me on the edge of my seat. After some digging around, it turns out running a large language model on something as small as a phone, tablet or notebook is not an easy thing to do. You need a lot of compute power and memory.
In The Talk Show Live from WWDC 2004, John Gruber asked a trio of Apple executives – John Giannandrea, Craig Federighi and Greg Joswiak – why Apple Intelligence won’t run on an older iPhone, and the answer was this:
Giannandrea: “So these models, when you run them at run times, it’s called inference, and the inference of large language models is incredibly computationally expensive. And so it’s a combination of bandwidth in the device, it’s the size of the 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.
Gruber: “So it’s not a scheme to sell new iPhones?”
Joswiak: “No, not at all. Otherwise, we would have been smart enough just to do our most recent iPads and Macs, too, wouldn’t we?”
What’s mentioned above, and requirement of 8GB of RAM is absolutely necessary to make the whole thing work flawlessly.
Apple could bring the feature to older iPhones and Macs, but given how poorly it would run, Apple decided against it. In the past I’ve seen iPhones being bogged down by new features to a point that they become absolutely unusable. The company didn’t want to sacrifice user experience and they want to stick with that.
However, with the passage of time, I’m hopeful Apple might figure out a way to spill this feature over to other devices. Maybe it will find a way to securely process information in its servers freeing up local resources completely. Until then, iPhone 15 Pro users will get first dibs on this feature.
