Apple Intelligence is currently in Beta. It has several features like Image Playground, smart reply suggestions, summarize features, a much better Siri, and several new writing tools. Your phone can also solve complex math problems. There’s also direct integration with OpenAI’s Chat GPT. Apple Intelligence is among the best implementations of AI on a smartphone.
Some of these happen via the cloud, but a lot of the processing is also done on-device. It’s also encrypted and stored locally on your phone, so it’s also theoretically more private. Since AI features are memory-hungry, they need a lot of RAM. They require large language models to power them, which need a minimum of 8GB RAM. The iPhones that have 8GB RAM right now are the iPhone 15 Pro and the iPhone 15 Pro Max.
The iPhone 14 and iPhone 14 Pro models both have only 6GB RAM. As a result, it’s difficult to run these models on-device. So, it doesn’t look like Apple will soon bring Apple Intelligence features to these phones. Apple wants all the new iPhones to support these new headline software features, and as per reports, the new iPhone SE 4 (2025) will also get Apple Intelligence features.
We don’t know whether they’ll bring the entire suite to the iPhone SE 4, but we can expect a majority of the useful features to work on it. Apple is also planning to bring these features to the new iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Plus models, which will also launch with 8GB RAM. It’s awkward to see an iPhone SE get Apple Intelligence features, but the 14 Pro- a much more expensive and premium phone- won’t get any.
If there’s enough demand, Apple might cave in and add some Apple Intelligence features to the iPhone 14 series or even some older iPhones. They’ve done so before. Initially, the Stage Manager was only for the iPad models with M1 chipsets. However, it was up and running a few months later with way older chipsets, too. The initial reasons for not adding it? RAM limitations. They’ve worked around those, and we can expect them to fine-tune Apple Intelligence so that it doesn’t occupy so much RAM.
Apple Intelligence isn’t even launching out of the box with the iPhone 16 models. It’ll arrive a month or two later with the iOS 18.1 update. However, the iPhone 16 models will have iOS 18 out of the box.
iOS 18.1 is still in Beta. iOS 18.1 Beta channels are simultaneously running alongside the regular iOS 18 Betas. It’s the first time Apple has so many concurrent Betas running.
We hope Apple eventually brings these features to older models. It’s not a good look when Samsung is bringing AI features to budget A series models like the A35. In additional leaks, the SE will also get a new 60Hz OLED display and a new single-camera design (48MP, similar to the iPhone 15). We also expect USB Type C, with 8GB RAM, and the A17 chipset. The expected launch is in Q1 2025, as per Mark Gurman.
