The iPhone 16 Isn’t Out Yet, and There’s Already a Reason to Wait for the iPhone 17

Apple doesn’t usually advertise the amount of memory it’s plopping into its new iPhones. But this latest rumor-mongering suggests skipping the iPhone 16 and waiting a generation for the iPhone 17 might be worth it if you’re feeling jealous over the Pixel 9/9 Pro‘s memory configuration. This year’s Google Pixel devices come with 12GB and 16GB between the entry-level and Pro models, respectively. Apple is rumored to follow suit with more RAM in next year’s iPhone release.

The speculation comes from Weibo, the Chinese social network where leaks reign supreme. The post is from the “Mobile phone chip expert” cited by Apple blogs before. When translated into English, the post reads:

If you want to change AI iPhone, maybe 2025 iPhone 17 is a good choice. This year’s [iPhone 16] has only 8GB of memory, mainly AI on the cloud side. Next year’s [iPhone 17] has 12GB of memory and more edge AI applications. For those who want to change iPhone with limited budget, of course, local tyrants need not consider it.

I’m not sure who the tyrants this post refers to are, though everything else I’m reading here makes sense. Google bumped up this year’s memory offerings in its Pixel flagships because AI is the name of the game. And it’s easy to believe that Apple would follow suit in this manner since it’s about a year behind the rest of the industry in hopping on the AI bandwagon. 

As I said, the annoying part is that Apple doesn’t immediately advertise how much memory is inside its devices the way the Android world does. In fact, I don’t even find out until an Apple blog helps reveal it. The current iPhone 15 Pro/Pro Max has 8GB of RAM for high-resource processing, which is four less than what the base-model Pixel 9 offers. Apple’s hardware runs differently, though, and since it owns everything it programs, it’s tweaked for memory management a little differently than Android phones. 

Still, with Google bumping up its entire lineup by 4GB, Apple might consider doing the same, especially as it moves more of Apple Intelligence onto devices.

Apple Intelligence is still a burgeoning concept among users in the walled garden. None of the features are live yet, as we expect them to debut formally with the launch of the iPhone 16. Apple Intelligence is not even available in the public iOS 18 beta. We know that Apple will take a hybrid approach to Apple Intelligence, where some processing is done on-device, and the rest pings the cloud. We also know that Apple is heavily touting the privacy and security of its Private Cloud Compute (PCC) servers. 

We’ll find out more soon. Apple will announce the iPhone 16 on Sept. 9 at its Glowtime event.