Apple Explains iPhone 15 Pro Requirement for Apple Intelligence

Giannandrea: "So these models, when you run them at run times, it's called inference, and the inference of large language models is incredibly computationally expensive. And so it's a combination of bandwidth in the device, it's the size of the Apple Neural Engine, it's the oomph in the device to actually do these models fast enough to be useful. You could, in theory, run these models on a very old device, but it would be so slow that it would not be useful.

Gruber: "So it's not a scheme to sell new iPhones?"

Joswiak: "No, not at all. Otherwise, we would have been smart enough just to do our most recent iPads and Macs, too, wouldn't we?"

If Apple's "Private Cloud Compute" is used even on the latest devices for some tasks that are too computationally complex to be done on-device, then is there some reason (other than money) that they can't launch Apple Intelligence on all iOS 18 devices but use the cloud for all "AI" requests that would be "too slow" because of the older chips?

So the latest M-series chips have less “neural” capacity than the A17 (Pro)? Was that by design? Surely Apple knew this was coming when they put the M4 in the iPad Pro first??

I’d be curious to see their internal benchmarks that led to the decision not to ship on earlier chips, since they implied that they tried.

> A17 Pro chip, which has a 16-core Neural Engine

maybe this is why my iPhone 15 pro battery under performs my iPhone 13 pro

A bit weird that the latest and greatest iPhone only has 8gb RAM, while 5 years ago the OnePlus 7 already had a model with 12GB.

Linux going on the M1 tonight.

"we want to sell more phones" that's basically it.