Apple Intelligence is the personal artificial intelligence system for iPhone, iPad, and Mac that combines the power of generative AI models with personal context to deliver intelligence that’s incredibly useful and relevant.
Apple Intelligence is deeply integrated into iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and macOS Sequoia. It harnesses the power of Apple silicon to understand and create language and images, take action across apps, and draw from personal context to simplify and accelerate everyday tasks.
With Private Cloud Compute, Apple sets a new standard for AI privacy, with the ability to flex and scale computational capacity between on-device processing and larger, server-based models that run on dedicated Apple Silicon servers.
Apple’s big push into AI – which the company insists stands for “Apple Intelligence” – could spark an upgrade “supercycle”, with the intense processing requirements for the souped-up Siri limiting it to only the most powerful iPhones currently on the market.
Apple’s new AI models will run on the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max, the only two devices the company has yet shipped with its A17 processor. Macs up to three years old will also be able to take advantage of the upgrade, provided they have a M1, 2 or 3 chip, and so too will iPad Pros with the same internal hardware.
Apple may have had little choice but to impose the restriction, says Francisco Jeronimo, of the analyst firm IDC. “The core is that most of the functionality of Apple Intelligence will run on-device [as opposed to in the cloud], and that requires a lot of processing power. Not all chipsets will be able to cope with that; not just the chipsets, even the memory and storage that it will require. This is not a short-term play, this is not about selling the iPhone 16 more than the previous version. It’s a long-term play – to make sure that they offer a very strong, appealing experience, by using AI.”
Apple’s primary interest was not in artificially juicing sales numbers for the next iPhone release, Jeronimo said, but in preparing for an upgrade supercycle as people fundamentally change how they think about their devices… “When the majority of us really understand what the tech can offer us, then a supercycle will kick in.”
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MacDailyNews Take: Who doesn’t love a nice iPhone supercycle?!
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There could also be higher ASP/margins because people will realize that a low-end model might not be as future-proof. Also, if you’re storing/running models on your phone, you’ll want to have more storage. There’s no way I’d go with a 128 GB phone anymore (and hopefully they’ll bump the minimum to 256).
I am saving up for the iPhone 16 Pro Max 512Gb. Off to Antarctica in January next year and it will be put to good use.