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Comment by starbugs | Hacker News Reader

Apple's AI strategy in a nutshell:

Sell more devices by using privacy and security as an argument for making new features available only on new iPhones.

Yup, this was the second thing I thought that's happening. Also, I wasn't sure whether to upgrade from 13 to 16. However, the AI angle tends everything towards buying a new phone.

A very smart move from Apple.

> A very smart move from Apple.

Indeed. Very smart.

"Stay hungry. Stay foolish."

It’s misleading to not point out that Apple Intelligence is compatible with all devices with at least an M1 — which was announced in November 2020.

On the mobile phone side, it's compatible only with the latest iPhone 15 Pro (not even the standard iPhone 15).

The parent comment makes it sound like everybody has to buy new hardware to use AI. Plenty of users with 2-3 year old hardware will be able to use it. As well as all the existing iPhone 15 Pro owners.

Apple will be selling iPhone 15s for the next 3 months that won’t get the AI features they just announced. When you buy an iPhone, you generally get software updates giving you new features for a few years at least. What they did with AI is kind of shitty, given their track record.

I mean, I’m glad not to have this AI stuff. I’m glad I have a buffer of iPhones that don’t support this AI when I will be forced to downgrade to a newer device from first SE.

If you don't trust Apple to disable AI when you ask them to, why use them?

I'd like to have a smarter Siri though. Guess I'm stuck with an idiot who can't even understand the word "bedroom" anymore (though it worked fine until a recent update)

On the other hand, if your phone can't run a model, it can't run a model, you can't ship people a new AI coprocessor to solder onto their iPhone's motherboard.

If you have a "Private Compute Cloud" setup anyway, you could give users the option to run the model there.

That’s true, but they’ve made a lot of noise about “private cloud compute” to run models too large for your device. They’re making the odd decision to not offer it as a subscription for devices less than a year old.

They’ve also certainly been working on LLMs for longer than the iPhone 15 and 14 have existed. They knew what it’d support before announcing those devices.

> It’s misleading to [unnecessary nitpicking]

I fixed that for you in the parent. Thanks for pointing it out.

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