"Technical reasons"

AI only for newer iPhones: Apple counters criticism

To be able to use the new "Apple Intelligence", you need at least an iPhone 15 Pro.

(Bild: Apple)

Following criticism, Apple has defended its decision to exclude owners of many older iPhones from the newly announced AI functions. This was purely for technical reasons, emphasized AI boss John Giannandrea in an interview on "The Talk Show" podcast on Tuesday. 

The devices would have to be powerful enough for the software, which would require at least an iPhone 15 Pro from last fall. Theoretically, the AI models could also be run on older technology - but they would be too slow to be useful, Giannandrea said.

There is more leeway with Mac computers: any of the in-house M-series chips, which Apple has been using to replace Intel processors since 2020, will do. The AI functions summarized under the name "Apple Intelligence" will also run on iPads with M chip systems. In addition to the chips, the RAM memory capacity also plays a role, said Head of Software Craig Federighi.

Outsourcing to the cloud
Apple aims to do as much computing work as possible on the devices, partly for data protection reasons. This also increases the demands on their performance. At the same time, the company has developed a process that transfers the tasks to Apple's servers in encrypted form. The data should then disappear completely from the cloud. "We do not use any user data to train our models," emphasized Giannandrea.

No aiding and abetting deepfakes
From the autumn, the new functions will, for example, summarize missed emails and short messages, create individual emoji symbols and find and bundle information on demand. The software will also be able to generate images from text templates. Unlike many other services, however, Apple AI does not generate artificial photos. "Because we don't want to make it easy to create deepfakes," said Giannandrea.