Apple Explains iPhone 15 Pro Requirement for Apple Intelligence

[AlexSwitch]

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.

So my iPhone 14 Pro is a " very old device ".... Apple time relativity!!! The truth is that Apple has been very stingy about Ram on its devices... The argumentation about the NPU performance is just a misleading excuse to cover some mistakes made about AI and its implementation in iOS and iPadOS.

 

[applepotato666]

Nonsense. Asking Siri to "send photos from yesterday's party to my friend via iMessage" is supposed to be some rocket science for technophiles??

There is no such thing as "normie person" when it comes to computing.

A more contextual query like that is one of the first things my mom tried with Siri when I got her an iPhone and she's in no way a technophile. She just wanted to try it, realized it only understands the most basic of queries, and she's never used it again. I think it would take quite a bit of effort to get people to give Siri another try. It's pretty ingrained in Apple users' minds now that it knows nothing about anything and has been like that for 13 years. It's not muscle memory to use it as Apple envisioned when they launched it. Far from that as it mostly leads to frustration and actively trains you to not rely on it with every query you consciously decide to give it.

 

[timonz]

Any hints on battery usage for the AI features?

 

[bluecoast]

I guess Apple well know that the privacy / on device requirement means that most new features are going to require new hardware.

Expect lots of ai photography tricks this fall which only work with new iPhones.

 

[iBluetooth]

Yes, but they surely knew the AI RAM requirements a few months ago when they released the base M3 MBA, iMac, and MBP that have 8GB. So, if additional RAM is going to be required, why didn't they up the memory then?

It takes 3 years to prepare a hardware release, it can't be done the month before. You have to decide on all the components and contract for them to be manufactured in time etc. Make hardware programming and test everything, they are selling millions of units.

 

[svish]

Happy that my 15 Pro Max is supported. As for my 2020 iPad Pro, knew that it will be missing out on the features.

 

[pksv]

It takes 3 years to prepare a hardware release, it can't be done the month before. You have to decide on all the components and contract for them to be manufactured in time etc. Make hardware programming and test everything, they are selling millions of units.

This.

There is one more thing for which I will probably get hit soon and be called an Apple defender, swallowing all their decisions and so on. People don't realize how much quantity of one device Apple has to deliver, how incredibly difficult because of the unification it is to source it, and that for some components there simply isn't enough factory capacity to deliver the required quantity. One such case is RAM, where Apple still uses DDR5 even though we already have DDR5X.
This is reality, although I will probably be called an Apple apologist anyway

 

[MilaM]

Yeah, I bought the 15 because I didn't need what the Pro offered, which, before AI, was primarily the camera upgrade. I certainly didn't expect embargoed features on a current, non-SE, model. Oh well, I'm not upgrading for a few years, so I'll just have to accept that. The RAM does seem to be a factor.

Usually the base model is also perfectly fine for my needs.

The upside is, that all the AI related things announced at WWDC will likely take a very long time to be rolled out to users. For some languages possibly two years and more. It's also quite likely, that even the current Pro will soon be underpowered for more advanced AI models. When you're ready for the next upgrade, these tool might actually be useful.

 

[MilaM]

If the next generation of iPhones will have more than 8 GB of RAM we will know for sure, that it is the limitation. I'm betting on 8 GB for the base model and 12 GB for the Pro.

 

[MilaM]

Maybe someone else has mentioned this by now but this is really Apple taking advantage of the fact the industry has standardized around 8 bit inference. There isn't really a point in doing 16 bit anything inference, especially at the edge. I don't see this as a genuine attempt by Apple to cover things up.

It would be nice though, if they somehow qualified the advertised numbers regarding the NPU performance (TOPS), at least in a footnote or a press release. With the available information I remain very skeptical about the figures, because the doubling of the NPU performance of the iPhone 15 Pro might indeed be completely meaningless.

 

[Abazigal]

This.

This is reality, although I will probably be called an Apple apologist anyway

In time, you will learn to wear this title as a badge of honour, and realise that there is no shame from choosing to say the right thing over what is simply ideologically popular at the time.

 

[dan71]

Apple was not ready for AI, ChatGPT, Google Gemini scared them….
so they had to present what they had, and only the newest devices can have it.
Apple just said to their customers that they you’ll need to change their devices in order to have AI.
at some point, we will all have it, but like I said Apple was not ready and had to present something.
Sad that what they are presenting, I won’t be able to use it on my iPhone 14 Pro.
my 14 MacBook Pro M1 will have it, I will probably buy a new iPad Pro, so I’ll have AI but not on my iPhone and this is ok as I have a very powerful device but not enough for what they announced…

 

[DannyGGG]

With iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and macOS Sequoia, Apple is introducing a new personalized AI experience called Apple Intelligence that uses on-device, generative large-language models to enhance the user experience across iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

These new AI features require Apple's latest iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max models to work, while only Macs and iPads with M1 or later chips will support Apple Intelligence. Since the news came to light, many users have been asking what the reason is for the cut-off.

In The Talk Show Live From WWDC 2024, Daring Fireball's John Gruber put the question to Apple's AI/machine learning head John Giannandrea, marketing chief Greg Joswiak, and software engineering chief Craig Federighi, and this was the response.
Apple's software engineering chief Craig Federighi said that the company's first move with any new feature is to work out how to bring it back to older devices as far as possible. But when it comes to Apple Intelligence, "This is the hardware that it takes... It's a pretty extraordinary thing to run models of this power on an iPhone," he added.

The iPhone 15 Pro models use the A17 Pro chip, which has a 16-core Neural Engine that's up to 2x faster than the A16 chip found in the iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Plus, performing nearly 35 trillion operations per second. Federighi hinted that RAM is also another aspect of the system that the new AI features require, so it is perhaps no coincidence that all the devices compatible with Apple Intelligence have at least 8GB of RAM.

Despite the cutoff, owners of older iPhones still have plenty to look forward to in Apple's upcoming software update: iOS 18 boasts several new features besides Apple Intelligence, and every iPhone that can run iOS 17 is compatible iOS 18. That includes the iPhone XR from 2018.

If you still want Apple Intelligence in your pocket but don't have an iPhone 15 Pro or iPhone 15 Pro Max, you may want to hold out for the iPhone 16 series, which is expected to launch when iOS 18 is released in the fall.

Article Link: Apple Explains iPhone 15 Pro Requirement for Apple Intelligence

So it's a combination of phone "bandwidth", neural engine "size", and "oomph." Wow, thanks for that detailed technical explanation. Now I totally understand. 🙄

 

[AppleEnthusiast1995]

Does this fix Siri searching what weather means on the web?

 

[rehkram]

That quote from Joswiak: "No, not at all. Otherwise, we would have been smart enough just to do our most recent iPads and Macs, too, wouldn't we?"

... is a textbook example of a logical fallacy.

 

[Mainsail]

It takes 3 years to prepare a hardware release, it can't be done the month before. You have to decide on all the components and contract for them to be manufactured in time etc. Make hardware programming and test everything, they are selling millions of units.

Perhaps you are right, but if 8GB were truly going to be problematic for AI, it doesn't seem like increasing base RAM to 12GB or 16GB would require an entire 3 year development cycle......given that RAM configuration is available and sold right now as an upgrade. I mean, it is not like they need to go through a whole new hardware design cycle from scratch to do it......if they thought AI was going to create issues for the base spec machines.

 

[Shirasaki]

its not any RAM, its magical Apple RAM 🙌

Which makes me wonder where are all the magics of those Apple RAM go? Shouldn’t their 6GB RAM function better than PC with 12GB or more RAM? Why Apple AI needs 8GB Physical RAM now?

 

[Shirasaki]

RAM seems to be a bit of a sore spot for Apple. They generally seem to try to avoid talking about it. It’s sort of like how they love talking about how fast their latest processor, NPI, or GPU is, but they don’t give any real concrete specs, such as clock speed.

Clock speed is not a useful parameter to compare anymore. But RAM… I mean, isn’t Apple RAM far more efficient and powerful than Windows counterparts? Besides, couldn't they just swap the hell of internal SSD to make it work? They don’t want to talk about it publicly but it’s not hard to reveal these critical facts anyway.

 

[Shirasaki]

That’d have been another conspiracy theory and a bunch of lawsuits about Apple deliberately destroying the battery life just to get them to upgrade.

From what I gather it’s mostly a RAM limitation and even then 8GB can only get you so far with LLMs.

Yeah but Apple charges an arm and a leg for RAM upgrades. It’s insane. I specced my M1 MacBook Pro with 16GB of RAM right from the start. Will see how well this fares with Apple AI. When I upgrade my iPad Pro later, I think I might be stuck with 1TB and above storage for more RAM.

 

[Shirasaki]

Apple saying that this isn't a scheme to sell knew iPhones is hilarious. Of COURSE it is. If it wasn't, then every phone, iPad and Mac that can take the update should be able to run "Apple Intelligence" I just wish they were honest with their customers and stop trying to be a "caring" company.

If they actually care, they’d design the Apple AI differently, possibly with varied RAM requirements for features, rather cutting off hard at 8GB of RAM And above. I just don’t believe its Engineering Teams telling the executive board 8GB Is the required minimum rather than marketing department asking engineering teams to come up with ideas pushing more people to upgrade. It feels way too convenient to cut out most of iPhone users at this point in time just for that one Apple AI feature no?

 

[Shirasaki]

Of course they want it on-device first; running giant cloud instances is expensive.

While I have no interest, whatsoever, in AI, I would prefer it be 100% local. I don't trust my data to the cloud.

How about iCloud backups? iCloud photos even. And besides, local AI doesn’t have the knowledge of the entire Internet.

 

[kkng]

So you want me to believe that Apple didn't already know in 2023 that they were going to develop and introduce AI functions with iOS 18 in 2024 and that this would require at least an A17 chip, which was built only into the Pro models in 2023 for whatever reason? Come on.

Samsung made its AI stuff available for older Galaxy models via software updates. It may not be as complex as Apple's AI, but it's the gesture that counts. Apple could have made at least some basic functions like object removal from images available to older models. The way it is right now, iOS 18 feels like a scam for owners of older iPhones. Just a slight visual improvement.

 

[rweiser]

iPad users: Give us software that makes use of the latest powerful hardware!
iPhone users: Give us software that doesn't need the latest powerful hardware!

 

[darngooddesign]

Apple knew the minimum spec for a feature that doesn't even enter beta until Fall 2024 when developing a phone to launch in Fall 2023? Heck, some parts of the iPhone 15 development probably started very shortly after the iPhone 14 shipped. So Apple knew all about LLM requirements in Fall 2022?

You're also complaining that Apple made a less expensive phone with cheaper parts. Of course they did. That's the whole point of a non-Pro phone--to make it more affordable.

Yeah cause 2GB more RAM is a huge expense.

What Im saying is that AI is Apple’s main OS thrust for the foreseeable future and Apple knowingly launched half their phones that don’t support it. There is no way that Apple didnt know what the minimum specs they needed to support their AI when they decided on the regular 15’s specs.

 

[GrayFlannel]

The company behind Siri is now developing an AI...wow.
Or to put it another way: yesterday they promised us an assistant, today we have a monkey. They promise us a scientist today and tomorrow we get a car mechanic.

Sorry Apple, but there are so many out there who are better than you in this area. I'm not going to make a purchase decision based on your ridiculous attempts at AI.

You've missed the boat, just face it.

Cook‘s leadership has allowed Apple to fall far behind the AI curve. They are now scurrying to catch up while desperately trying to appear well positioned. Apple was once a great company with great products. But that was then and this is now.