During the presentation of the Apple Intelligence feature package, the company announced that it will only be available on the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max, as well as on Macs and iPads with chips no older than the M1. An Apple representative later clarified the reason for this decision, emphasizing that it was not a strategy to drive sales of new devices.
Greg Jozwiak, Apple’s Marketing Director, was one of the first to outline the brand’s position. In an interview with Daring Fireball, he stated that the high hardware demands of Apple AI are a technical necessity, not a sales tactic for the iPhone 15 Prom, notes NIXSolutions. This sentiment was echoed by Apple’s head of software development, Craig Federighi, who explained that performing AI tasks requires significant hardware power; on older iPhone models, AI performance would simply be too slow.
Hardware Specifications of the iPhone 15 Pro
The iPhone 15 Pro series models are equipped with the A17 Pro chip, featuring a 16-core Neural Engine that is twice as fast as the A16, delivering about 35 TOPS (trillion operations per second) in AI operations. According to Federighi, another critical factor is the amount of RAM. All Apple Intelligence-compatible devices have at least 8 GB of RAM.
We’ll keep you updated as more information becomes available.