There’s a good reason why older iPhone models, including the iPhone 15 won’t get Apple Intelligence features. Let me explain.
It All Boils Down to Compute Power and Memory – That’s Why Older iPhone Models Won’t Get Apple Intelligence Features
Turns out, running a large language model and other AI features on something as small as a phone is a very, very challenging task. In fact, Apple is doing most of it right on the iPhone unless it really needs that cloud computing power, only then it may tap out.
In case you’re wondering, devices like the Humane AI Pin and Rabbit R1 rely entirely the cloud for requests that’s why the hardware can be relatively weaker for the whole thing to work. That’s the reason you get a long wait time before you get a reply back. The request is sent to the server, processed, and you get a generated reply back.
If you want AI to run on-device, with features like image generation, you need a ton of memory and compute power. Now, look at the screenshot from Apple’s website below and think for a second what’s common in all of these devices:
Apart from the obvious ‘Apple silicon’ hardware, the one thing that’s consistent across the board is simple – the minimum amount of RAM which is 8GB.
I am not going to do a deep dive into the technicalities of how AI and ML models work on-device. I will leave that to the experts and you’ll enjoy their explanations more.
Now, you might be wondering why the Vision Pro is missing from the table? That’s a valid question and I believe it’s intentional. There’s no way Apple is not bringing Apple Intelligence to its finest hardware. Apple did mention it will bring AI to ‘other platforms’ later and there’s a chance it’s the Vision Pro.
I could be wrong. ‘Other platforms’ could mean anything at all.
I have genuine concerns regarding Apple Intelligence and its requirement for memory. For instance, with 8GB of RAM, we occasionally see apps like Safari reload tabs if too many apps are running in the background. RAM is finite, and it will run out if you’re running an extensive task. How will Apple Intelligence affect all this? Are we going to sacrifice a huge amount of memory just to generate an image or rewrite text? How much toll will it have on battery life? These answers will only be with us as time moves on, it’s too early to speculate.
I now wholeheartedly accept the harsh reality of how things work in the world of AI and ML. It all boils down to memory and compute power, if you’re running something this powerful on a device as small as the iPhone.
At the same time, it remains to be seen how powerful the iPhone 16 lineup is going to be, since Apple is going to market it with AI chops in mind.
