Apple explains iPhone 15 Pro requirement for iOS 18 AI features

Apple’s new artificial intelligence features, announced with iOS 18, need an iPhone 15 Pro to work. The company has explained that the reason behind this is not to sell more new iPhones, but rather AI’s computational requirements.

During a WWDC talk show, Daring Fireball’s John Gruber asked Apple’s AI/machine learning head John Giannandrea, marketing chief Greg Joswiak, and software engineering chief Craig Federighi why the AI features are limited to iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max (Via MacRumors).

To which Giannandrea responded, “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,” Giannandrea added.

Gruber further asked the Apple executives if the limitation is a “scheme to sell new iPhones.” To which Greg Joswiak replied, “No, not at all. Otherwise, we would have been smart enough just to do our most recent iPads and Macs too, wouldn’t we?”

Apple made it clear that it’s the hardware requirements that stop it from making Apple Intelligence features available to older iPhones. The iPhone 15 Pro models pack the A17 Pro which is powerful enough to run AI features. To run these features on a MacBook or iPad, you need a device with an Apple M1 chip or above.

The AI features Apple introduced as part of Apple Intelligence include an AI-powered Siri, Writing Tools for rewriting, proofreading, and summarizing text, and Image Playground, which allows you to create images in apps.