Apple primes The Mother of All iPhone Supercycles™
With the unveiling of the Apple Intelligence-capable iPhone 16 family of smartphones later today, Apple is seeding what could become The Mother of All iPhone Supercycles, a multi-year upgrade cycle that will sell hundreds of millions of iPhones.
Austin Carr and Vlad Savov for Bloomberg News:
Apple is pushing the idea that new iPhone components will enable some of the AI computing that others offload to datacenters in the cloud to happen locally — and thus privately.
Having parts of Siri’s AI brain implanted inside the iPhone is vital to maintaining data security and giving users peace of mind, says Apple. Of course, that pitch just happens to align with Apple’s mission of selling hundreds of millions of new iPhones every year.
For customers, the question is whether unique, but inevitably limited, hardware-enhanced AI features are worth the price of a whole new smartphone. Apple has indicated that Apple Intelligence will only be compatible with the iPhone 15 and above.
According to Gadjo Sevilla, an analyst at research firm Emarketer Inc., it’s possible the Siri you use today will get some boost from AI no matter the iPhone you have, but don’t expect Apple to make its more comprehensive Apple Intelligence experience backward-compatible. “This strategy serves a twofold purpose,” Sevilla said. “A slower rollout of features to iPhone 16 adopters will be easier to manage at scale, and access to AI will incentivize upgrades to the latest models.”
MacDailyNews Take: This will be a slow burn – a stronger-than-usual multi-year upgrade cycle – as Apple Intelligence features get written, tested, and delivered to customers over a period of many months, into next year certainly, and, with new, as-yet-unannounced features, beyond.
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