We know as much about Apple’s AI, dubbed “Apple Intelligence,” as there is to come, at least until we get some hands-on time with it (which likely won’t be until next year). Still, you can only experience better Siri and “semantic” AI if you have one iPhone 15 Pro or iPhone 15 Pro Max. Apple has finally offered a (slightly) more detailed explanation as to why we’ll never see it upcoming AI features came to older iPhones, while promising that this isn’t just a big scheme to force users to upgrade.
Yet I still wonder why cloud-based AI like ChatGPT won’t be retroactively rolled back when Samsung has already proven it can be done. Jon Gruber of Daring Fireball (via MacRumors) asked the question we’re all thinking. “Is iPhone 15 Pro AI exclusivity all about money?” Apple’s AI chief, John Giannandrea, and its chief marketing officer, Greg Joswiak, said no, of course not.
All recent M-series chips found in MacBooks and iPads have access to Apple Intelligence. The A17 Bionic chip on the iPhone 15 Pro has 16 cores NPU capable of reaching 35 TOPS (trillion operations per second). This is supposed to be twice the neural capability of the A16 Bionic, limited to regular ones iPhone 15 and iPhone 14 Pro.
According to Giannandrea, this is due to the “inference” – the AI execution time – that it is “incredibly computationally expensive” for large language models. According to Apple’s lead developers, the RAM component also determines how well the AI works on the device.
“In theory, you could run these models on a very old device, but it would be so slow that it wouldn’t be useful,” he said.
When Gruber asked if this was a scheme to sell new iPhones, Joswiak denied it, saying, “Otherwise, we’d be smart enough to make our latest iPads and Macs too, right?”
There will be different AI features on the MacBook compared to the iPhone, but the neural capacity of Apple’s ARM-based chips started out relatively minimal compared to now. The 2020 M1 chip had a neural processor capable of 11 TOPS, though it will seemingly get some of these new AI features. M2 could do 15.8. The latest M4 chip on iPad Pro can make 38 vertices. How well each of these devices works with AI is another matter, though Apple has reiterated that it should be fine.
The A16 Bionic chip’s NPU has a claimed 17 TOPS speed, although the iPhone 14 Pro’s base RAM is just 6GB compared to the 15 Pro’s 8GB. There will certainly be hardware architecture differences between the two Pro-level phones, but judging by Apple’s comments, 2GB of RAM seems like enough to limit the AI to the latest and greatest iPhone.
Also, there is some ambiguity as to exactly what “Apple Intelligence” is and what isn’t. Apple’s vice president of software engineering and parkour expert, Craig Federighi, said that ad features like Math Notes or smart script on the iPad aren’t built on top of any of Apple’s AI models, so they come on older devices.
Earlier this year, Samsung began porting some AI features that were once exclusive to the S24 to the Galaxy S23 line, including the middle class S23 FE. Features like Circle to Search and Live Translate were backdated to Galaxy Fold 5 and Turning 5. Note that these were not all new Galaxy AI features on the S24. Still, it’s a sign that some of these functions, which are supposed to require a lot of neural processing capabilities, can work on older devices, especially since many of these AI models run in the cloud. Samsung has even mentioned how it might one day do so force consumers to pay to keep the data center lights on while processing this power-hungry AI.
We know that Apple’s big plans for artificial intelligence will be a holistic package, affecting everything you can do on your device. Siri is supposed to be the one element that ties it all together. Apple wants AI to access your emails and text messages and even control your apps. For example, if you ask about your plans with your mom later in the month, he should be able to parse that information through text messages and emails.
Apple has promised much of that AI will run on the devices and any part that isn’t sent to the cloud. This is supposed to be run by Apple’s own data centers powered by M-series processors. The Cupertino company further promises that we will have the most secure and private cloud computing infrastructure to keep user data safe. However, apart from the demos shown on WWDC 2024we still don’t know which aspects of AI services will be handled in the latest Bionic chips and which will require cloud computing.
Or us? Currently, many AI drawing functions are based on OpenAI’s ChatGPT. It will work natively with Apple Intelligence on iOS 18, if nothing else to get the Apple Intelligence ball rolling. It’s pretty much the only AI feature we know will be coming sooner rather than later, and it will necessarily need to run in the cloud. Apple previously confirmed with Gizmodo that ChatGPT and all Apple Intelligence will remain on the iPhone 15 Pro.
