In a little over a week’s time, Apple will unveil iOS 18 and its other new operating system versions, with a heavy focus on bringing AI features to its customers at a system level.
Apple is expected to use a combination of on-device and cloud for AI processing. But customers might need the latest and greatest to be able to use these new features. Mark Gurman writes that many of the upcoming on-device artificial intelligence will require the latest high-end, the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max.
That would mean that to use every new iOS 18 feature, customers would be expected to own the latest high-end ‘Pro’ iPhones with the A17 Pro chip. (Note that the cheaper iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Plus released last fall, are powered by the older A16 chip.)
The A17 minimum requirement is probably partly a result of product marketing segmentation with Apple increasing the appeal of higher-end models, and partly a result of technical requirements. The A17 features significantly faster CPU and GPU cores, and a new 16-core Neural Engine capable of 35 trillion operations per second. The integrated RAM on the chip also increased from 6 GB to 8 GB.
By the time iOS 18 ships to the public, likely in September, the iPhone 15 Pro series will be a year old and Apple will have unveiled the 2024 iPhone 16 lineup — which will undoubtedly support all the iOS 18 features, and maybe even have additional AI exclusive capabilities.
Expected system requirements for Mac and iPad seems a bit more inclusive, with Gurman suggesting that the cutoff may be the M1 chip. That would date back to the 2020 Apple Silicon Macs and the 2021 iPad Pro, or later models.
With the M1 cutoff, all iPad and Mac models would have at least 8 GB RAM available, which may turn out to be the primary limiting factor. If the power of the Neural Engine was the bottleneck, only the newer M3 or M4 chip sport a Neural Engine as powerful as the one found in the iPhone 15 Pro.
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