Apple has been working on several AI features for the iPhone 16 series and above, which were also expected to reach older models with the iOS 18 update. However, Mark Gurman has recently revealed that more advanced AI features will only be rolled out to the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max.
Only basic features could be rolled out to older iPhones
According to Mark Gurman, the basic AI functions in iOS 18 will run on-device, while more advanced features require more processing capability and will rely on Apple’s servers.
According to previous reports, Apple is also developing chips to deploy on its servers to run the advanced AI features. Reports have also mentioned that the company plans to use its M series chips in its servers to handle the AI processing.
Not offering the cloud-based AI features to more iPhones could be due to the limited infrastructure at present. Samsung and Google have also kept many of their cutting-edge AI features exclusive to newer models.
iOS 18 will reportedly include AI features like notification summarization (called Greymatter Catch Up), object removal from images, a revamped notes app with speech-to-text conversion and summarization capability, and more. The development also adds new capabilities to Siri, such as the ability to open a specific document, delete an email, summarize an article etc.
Older iPhone models may get some text-based AI features
Notably, most of the text-based features should be classified as the basic features that can also run on-device. So, recent iPhone models that are eligible for iOS 18 (iPhone 11 series and above, iPhone XS, iPhone XS Max, iPhone XR, iPhone SE (2nd generation), iPhone SE (3rd generation)) could get those features. However, it’s not clear yet which exact features will run on-device.
Additionally, Mark Gurman says there could also be some on-device AI-based functionality that the iPhone 15 Pro models and later can handle but not the older models and the non-Pro iPhone 15 models with A16 Bionic. Those features could also remain exclusive to the latest models.
iPadOS 18 and macOS 15 will also get some of the AI features. According to Gurman, the requirement for macOS and iPadOS devices will be at least an M1 chip or a later version. So, Intel-powered Mac devices won’t get the features either. It’s reasonable as the Intel chips and the Bionic chips in older iPhone models lack the capable NPU that’s necessary to run the on-device LLMs.
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