Apple Insider Details An Expensive iPhone Pro Decision

Updated June 2: article originally posted June 1

Next week, Apple will hold its annual Worldwide Developer Conference, where it will introduce several AI-based tools that will power the iPhone 16 family when the handsets are launched in September. Many of these tools will be available to older iPhones, but only the iPhone 15 Pro will make full use of them.

Update: Sunday June 2: Writing for Bloomberg’s Power On newsletter, Mark Gurman raises a worrying detail about Apple’s push to integrate AI with the iPhone 16 family and iOS 18. It won’t be ready for the new iPhone launch in September.

“Though Apple plans to push out several AI features this fall with iOS 18, the upgraded Siri capabilities won’t arrive until sometime next year. Still, they provide a good idea of how broad Apple is thinking about AI — and how deeply it hopes to integrate the technology into its products.”

While it does give us a look at Apple’s thinking on this issue, even a generous January launch of the new AI features will see the iPhone pick up the basic table stakes of what consumers see as AI some 15 months after Google debuted them on the Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro,12 months after Samsung debuted its system on the Galaxy S24, 24+ and S24 Ultra, and almost a year after the rush of Android AI smartphones launched at CES 2024.

There’s every chance that Google, Samsung, OnePlus, Honor, and other manufacturers will be on their second-generation of AI-first smartphones before Apple manages to ship its first-generation effort. That’s assuming you have a handset that will support the new software; only the current iPhone 15 Pro will be able to leverage the full suite of AI tools.

The likely reason is the A17 Pro chipset inside the Pro models. This is Apple’s latest Axx mobile chipset, and it is notable that Apple weakened the iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Plus models by using the then-year-old A16 chipset. The extra power of the A17 Pro’s Neural engine, alongside the faster CPU and GPU cores, will be needed to run the on-device LLMs and generative AI routines.

Even then, the iPhone 16 Pro models will see the updated A18 Pro chipset; and if Apple has made the same decisions as Qualcomm and Samsung, the A18 will have silicon specifically designed to support the intensive AI routines. While the iPhone 15 Pro and 15 Pro Max may have just enough power in the A17 to match the A18, the lower specced vanilla models will likely be left out in the cold.

There may be an option to offload some AI routines into the cloud. This is the approach taken by several Android manufacturers looking for more extensive AI processes or offering AI capabilities to lower-spec hardware. If this is the case, expect Apple to lean heavily into the privacy implications of AI in the cloud and how Apple will be able to mitigate this risk.

I’m sure Apple would prefer that users consider the other option, buying a new handset specifically to upgrade to an AI-capable handset.

AI means many things to many people, but one of the biggest benefits for the smartphone industry is the need for new hardware to deliver competent solutions. Apple will no doubt put its spin on AI—a spin that is likely to focus on supporting the user with summaries, better images, natural responses from Siri, and more accurate image processing—but the underlying drive will echo the competition… if you want one of the first AI smartphones, you’re going to need to buy a new handset.

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