Many Apple users were disappointed after the company revealed that iPhones other than the iPhone 15 Pro will not have Apple Intelligence AI capabilities. Many were quick to speculate that this was due to hardware limitations on other iPhones, including differences in RAM (8GB RAM in the Pro vs. 6GB in the standard models) and inferior SoC.
However, in a recent development, Apple’s head of AI strategy, John Giannandrea, revealed that older iPhone models could theoretically support Apple Intelligence, but the experience may not be optimal. .
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Can run on older iPhone models but experience lag
In a discussion about Podcast by John GruberGiannandrea explains that while it is possible to run Apple Intelligence on older hardware, performance will lag and become unusable. Giannandrea says performance will be ‘too slow and won’t be useful’.
“Inference of large language models is extremely computationally expensive,” he said. “It’s a combination of the bandwidth in the device, the size of the ANE, and the power in the device to actually execute these models fast enough to be useful,” he added.
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What is the minimum to run Apple Intelligence?
Considering that the Apple iPhone 15 Pro has the A17 Pro SoC with the latest Neural Engine and 8GB RAM, it is likely that this is the minimum Apple will require to implement these AI features in future iPhone models.
This is also why reports suggest that the vanilla iPhone 16 model could ship with 8GB RAM. This could be a necessary step to ensure that the latest iPhone 16 models can run the latest software features and avoid creating a significant gap between the Pro and standard models.
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