APPLE Intelligence received a warm welcome at WWDC2024, when we learned that the iphone15Pro and iPhone15Pro Max are the only Apple smartphones that can be used at startup, things got a little bit different, but a new interview with 3 Apple executives will better explain why Apple's latest and most expensive iPhone is the only iPhone that can use apple Intelligence. I understand.

While talking about live recordings of podcasts with apple's John Giannandrea, Craig Federighi and Greg Joswiak, Daring Fireball's John Gruber discusses Apple's decision to cut off the device for Apple Intelligence compatibility. I replied that it is possible to run it on a less powerful iPhone, but not fast enough.

"Inference of large language models is incredibly computationally expensive...You could theoretically run these models on very old devices, but that would be useless and slow," says Giannandrea.

When Gruber faced a panel directly about whether the apple Intelligence cutoff was "a plan to sell a new iPhone," Joswiak, Apple's worldwide marketing officer SVP, said Apple Intelligence compatibility has not changed since an iPad or Mac with an M-series chip (the oldest is the MacBook Air M1 launched in 2020). The company responded that it was hardware-based and not a ruse to drive the upgrade.

Federighi, SVP of SOFTWARE engineering, said, "Our first move is to understand how we can bring the functionality back as much as possible."

"It's very special to run this power model on the iPhone, and it turns out that we built this iPhone.

For further details, Federighi said that Apple Intelligence compatibility depends on "many dimensions of the system," and RAM is one of the pieces.""

The importance of RAM capacity to run Apple Intelligence was already suggested by analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, Who pointed out that 8GB of RAM seems to be the smallest on a compatible Apple device. The only iPhone models that offer that much RAM, you guessed it, are the iPhone15Pro and iPhone15Pro Max. Giannandrea also pointed to Neural Engine, Apple's in-house NPU, as a major factor. "The A17Pro (the chip inside the iPhone15Pro) is not the first chip to have a Neural Engine, but it has a much larger Neural Engine than the chips that have appeared before."Specifically, the a17Pro's neural engine is capable of 15TOPS (tera/trillion operations per second), compared to 14TOPS of the A16Bionic chips used in the basic iPhone17 and iPhone35Pro. The silver lining for older iPhone owners is that other new features announced as part of iOS 18 will work on iPhones as old as the iPhone XS and iPhone XR in 2018. This includes a larger home screen and lock screen customization, app hide and lock functionality, a wider range of text formatting for messages, and

All iPhone16 models (launched on May 9 this year) as all models are rumored to need to use enough RAM and a sufficient chipset. But to take full advantage of Apple Intelligence, which has already been confirmed to launch in the fall, anyone looking to upgrade their iPhone this year should spring the iPhone16Pro or iPhone16Pro Max to ensure full compatibility.