Apple Intelligence: Why the AI features aren’t coming to older iPhones

The highlight of the announcements at WWDC 2024 was no doubt Apple Intelligence – a set of AI-powered, system-wide features that select Apple devices will enjoy later this year.

While the feature-set did look impressive, and brings a number of impressive capabilities to iPhones, Macs and iPads, only newer devices will enjoy Apple Intelligence perks.

These include MacBooks powered by any M-series chipset, including the M1 MacBook Air. This is great because even a four-year old laptop will be able to use the new AI features. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for most iPhones.

ALSO READ: iOS 18 to Apple Intelligence: Everything announced at WWDC 2024

Of Apple’s entire lineup of iPhones that are supported by software right now, only the newest iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max will be able to get Apple Intelligence and its AI features. While that may seem like a way to get customers to upgrade to the newer ‘Pro’ iPhones, this actually isn’t the case.

Why Apple Intelligence will not come to older iPhones

As per Apple AI chief John Giannandrea, Apple Intelligence requires more computational power than most other iOS features that come out every year. This includes the ability to run large language models on the device, something older iPhones are not capable of.

As Giannandrea said during The Talk Show by John Gruber, the feasibility of running Apple Intelligence on an iPhone is “a combination of bandwidth in the device, the size of the ANE [Apple Intelligence Neural Engine], and the oomph in the device to actually run 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 it would not be useful,” he added.

This is a tough pill to swallow, especially for iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Plus users, whose devices are less than a year old, and may already feel outdated because of certain features.

What about the upcoming iPhone 16?

The larger question now is, will Apple’s future non-Pro models be able to run the AI suite? Apple is expected to launch its new iPhone 16 series later this year, possibly in September, which would be close to when iOS 18’s stable build and Apple Intelligence could go public.

It is safe to assume that the new base iPhones will support the feature, and possibly run by a more powerful chip to make this possible. It would certainly be very weird if Apple’s newest iPhones would not support its standout feature that was announced months ago.

That said, this is speculation on our part, and we will just have to wait for the new iPhones to come out to find out whether the smartphones pack enough punch to run Apple Intelligence.