Apple Unveils 'AppleIntelligence' with Some Limitations

TapTechNews June 19th. Apple prominently unveiled its全新 AI system, AppleIntelligence, at the WWDC 2024 event and announced that it will be landing on iPad, iPhone, and Mac platforms this fall.

However, unfortunately, there seem to be some limitations with this AI system. On the iPhone side, currently only the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max can be used. Of course, the four models of the yet-to-be-released iPhone 16 series will also support AppleIntelligence. But since WWDC, we've often seen Apple users asking why set hardware limitations?

In the WWDC 2024 interview program, Apple's head of AI/machine learning, John Giannandrea, marketing head Greg Joswiak, and software engineering head Craig Federighi gave answers to this question:

Giannandrea: The inference computations of large language models are very large. Therefore, it is very dependent on the bandwidth of the device, the scale of the NPU, and the performance of the device itself, so strong enough performance is required for these models to run at a decent speed. Theoretically, you can run these models on very old devices, but the running speed is so slow that it's completely useless.

Host Gruber: So it's definitely not a forced limitation to sell new iPhones, right?

Joswiak: Exactly, how could it be. Otherwise, if we were that smart, we would definitely set limitations for the latest iPads and Macs as well, right?

Craig Federighi, Apple's software engineering head, said that when the company launches all new features, the first consideration is to make them available to older devices as much as possible, but for AppleIntelligence, this is the necessary hardware...running such a powerful model on an iPhone is a remarkable thing.

According to TapTechNews, the A17 Bionic chip equipped in Apple's iPhone 15 Pro series models has a 16-core neural engine, which is twice as fast as the A16 chip in the iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Plus, capable of performing nearly 35 trillion operations per second.

Federighi also stated that memory is another important element required for AI functions. Therefore, all devices compatible with AppleIntelligence need to have at least 8GB of memory.