Here’s why the iPhone 15, 15 Plus won’t have new AI tricks (it’s not the chip)

Apple announced a variety of new AI tricks for its iPhones earlier this month, dubbed Apple Intelligence. Unfortunately, most iPhone owners are left behind, as only the iPhone 15 Pro series will get these features.

NOW, Bloomberg Journalist Mark Gurman revealed why the iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Plus were left out. It turns out that less powerful machine learning hardware isn’t the reason, and it depends “almost entirely” on the amount of RAM.

“The tech giant determined internally a few months ago that 8 GB (of RAM – editor’s note) was the minimum needed to run Apple Intelligence,” Gurman explained in his Power On newsletter. Of course, the iPhone 15 and 15 Plus sport 6GB of RAM.

He added that Apple is upgrading the vanilla iPhone 16’s RAM to 8GB to support Apple Intelligence features. As a result, it is believed that all models of the iPhone 16 series will support the company’s AI features.

“That’s why Apple is increasing the memory of the standard iPhone 16 this fall: to support Intelligence and make it a key selling point,” Gurman continued.

THE Bloomberg The reporter added that Apple’s AI silicon is “virtually the same on M1 Macs and iPads, which support Apple Intelligence, as it is on the iPhone 13, 14 and 15, which do not.”

AI and RAM: a familiar turn of events

This wouldn’t be the first time, however, that a smartphone brand has ignored AI features built into a standard flagship phone. Google brought its Gemini Nano on-device AI model to the Pixel 8 Pro last year, but initially ignored the vanilla Pixel 8.

A company representative claimed that “hardware limitations” were the reason the vanilla Pixel was missing. Both phones share the same chipset, however, but the Pixel 8 packs 8GB of RAM compared to the Pro model’s 12GB. Google will later release Gemini Nano for the Pixel 8 as a developer option.

Needless to say, we hope Apple is working on ways to bring Apple Intelligence capabilities to devices with 6GB of RAM. This would mean that hundreds of millions of users could access these new AI features.