Apple Execs Explain Why Apple Intelligence Is Not Available On Older Devices And Assure It Is Not A Scheme To Sell New iPhones

iOS 18 brought a slew of new visual changes for all compatible iPhones, but the platform has placed a limitation on Apple Intelligence, as it is exclusively available on the iPhone 15 Pro models. Apple Intelligence requires raw power to operate on-device generative AI large language models for better performance, and the A17 Pro chip in the iPhone 15 Pro is the perfect candidate to handle such tasks. Besides the iPhone, Apple’s new AI utilities are also restricted to iPads and Macs with at least an M1 chip. Apple executives have now come forward, detailing why Apple Intelligence is available on Apple Silicon powered iPhones, iPads, and Macs.

Apple explains why Apple Intelligence is limited to iPhone 15 Pro models, iPads, and Macs with Apple Silicon

Ever since the company announced Apple Intelligence on stage, users have been asking why the AI features are only available for the iPhone 15 Pro models and iPads and Macs with Apple Silicon. In The Talk Show From WWDC 2024, Apple’s head of machine learning and AI, John Giannandrea, marketing chief Greg Joswiak, and software head, Craig Federighi, told Daring Fireball’s John Gruber the reasons why Apple Intelligence is not available on older devices and why it is not just a scheme to sell more iPhones.

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.

When Gruber asked if it was a scheme to sell more iPhones, Joswiak stated that if it was, the company was smart enough to add the most recent iPads and Macs as a requirement as well. Craig Federighi also stated that it is Apple’s main priority to introduce a feature that can be translated onto older devices, but in the case of Apple Intelligence, it is purely a hardware requirement. He also stated that “it is a pretty extraordinary thing to run models of this power on an iPhone.”

The A17 Pro chip houses a 16-core Neural Engine, which is twice as capable as the A16 Bionic chip in the standard iPhone 15 models. Now we know that the company is not just deliberately seeking to sell new iPhones but seeing the latest iPhone as the only device capable of handling Apple Intelligence features.