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- The phone cutoff for Apple's gen AI system, Apple Intelligence, is the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max.
- Apple's AI head, John Giannandrea, said older iPhones can't handle the computational demands of AI.
- Apple Intelligence will roll out with iOS 18 and the new iPhone 16 lineup this fall.
Why can't you run Apple's fancy new AI features — collectively called Apple Intelligence — on your old iPhone? It wouldn't be a good time, according to Apple.
The company limited its highly anticipated generative AI system to only the latest iPhones — the iPhone 15 Pro and the iPhone 15 Pro Max and the upcoming lineup, presumably called the iPhone 16. But, fortunately, more models of Macs and iPads qualify. You just need an iPad or Mac with an M1 chip, which means models launched in recent years will work.
In an interview with John Gruber's podcast "The Talk Show" after Apple's WWDC last week, Apple's head of AI strategy and machine learning, John Giannandrea, explained that while the AI model could theoretically run on older devices, it would be "so slow, it would not be useful."
The stricter cutoff for iPhones isn't an arbitrary limit to drum up smartphone sales, according to Giannandrea.
"Otherwise, we'd been smart enough just to do recent iPads and Macs too, wouldn't we," added Apple's CMO Greg Joswiak.
According to Giannandrea, Apple's newest A17 chip is the ideal hardware for running Apple Intelligence, in part because its ANE [Apple Neural Engine].
"The inference of large language models is incredibly computationally expensive," he said. "So it's a combination of bandwidth in the device, it's the size of the ANE, it's the oomph in the device to actually do these models fast enough to be useful."
The latest iPhones also have more RAM, or memory, which is also key to running on-device generative AI features.
"The No. 1 constraint in running these models is memory," tech analyst Ben Thompson previously told Business Insider's Peter Kafka. "And every single device that supports this has 8 gigabytes of RAM as a minimum. That's just the long and short of it."
While Apple said the cutoff for Apple Intelligence on the iPhone wasn't intended to drum up sales, it could use any extra incentive to convince customers to upgrade their old device. Sales of iPhones declined 10% year over year in the first quarter, and data suggests people are holding on to their iPhones longer.
Apple Intelligence features will be free for users and are set to start rolling out in the fall with iOS 18 and the new iPhone lineup.