Why Apple Intelligence only works on iPhone 15 Pro or later
Apple Intelligence, which works on iPhone 15 Pro, iPhone 15 Pro Max, and later (see you this fall), unlocks new ways for users to enhance their writing and communicate more effectively. With brand-new systemwide Writing Tools, users can rewrite, proofread, and summarize text nearly everywhere they write, including Mail, Notes, Pages, and third-party apps.
On iPhone, Apple’s artificial intelligence – Apple Intelligence – will only work if you have an iPhone 15 Pro or iPhone 15 Pro Max or later. This situation should help spur a healthier iPhone upgrade cycle than we’ve seen over the past few years, but there’s a technical reason for it as well.
Any recent M-series chips found in MacBooks and iPads can access Apple Intelligence. The iPhone 15 Pro’s A17 Bionic chip has a 16-core NPU capable of hitting 35 TOPS (trillions of operations per second). That’s supposed to be twice as much neural capability as the A16 Bionic, restricted to the regular iPhone 15 and iPhone 14 Pro.
According to [Apple’s AI chief, John] Giannandrea, it’s due to the “inference” — the runtime of AI – that it is “incredibly computationally expensive” for large language models. According to Apple’s lead developers, a RAM component also determines how well AI runs on-device.
“You could, in theory, run these models on a very old device, but it would be so slow that it would not be useful,” he said.
There will be different AI features on the MacBook compared to the iPhone, but the neural capacity of Apple’s ARM-based chips started relatively minimal compared to now. The M1 chip from 2020 had a neural processor capable of 11 TOPS, though it will ostensibly receive some of these new AI features. The M2 could do 15.8. The latest M4 chip on the iPad Pro can do 38 TOPS. How well each of these devices runs the AI is another question, though Apple has reiterated it should be fine.
The A16 Bionic chip’s NPU has a purported 17 TOPS speed, though the base RAM on the iPhone 14 Pro was only 6 GB compared to the 15 Pro’s 8 GB. There are bound to be hardware architecture differences between the two Pro-level phones, but judging by Apple’s comments, the 2 GB of RAM seems enough to restrict AI to the latest and greatest iPhone.
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