Apple Intelligence too RAM-hungry to run on Apple iPhone 15 and 15 Plus claims analyst ^↺

Apple announced Apple Intelligence at WWDC 2024, a cross-platform AI suite dubbed as a personal intelligence system. It brings a variety of AI tricks, including Writing Tools, image generation, and a "more natural, more personal" Siri. However, these won't be available on any phones other than the iPhone 15 Pro and 15 Pro Max. At least, not before the new series is out.

The company didn't go much into why the other two models from the iPhone 15 series are getting left out. Many assumed that the Apple A17 Pro is why only the Pro models get Apple Intelligence. But Mark Gurman from Bloomberg says otherwise.

Gurman reports that it's the amount of memory that's making the iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Plus incompatible with the new AI features. In his Power On newsletter, he explains that Apple has internally determined that 8 GB of RAM is the minimum requirement.

To compare, the regular and Plus models within the iPhone 15 series come with 6 GB of RAM. Gurman continues that Apple will release the iPhone 16 with 8 GB of RAM, making it compatible with Apple Intelligence. It will reportedly be one of the key selling points.

While Gurman didn't talk much about the iPhone 16 Plus, if the regular variant gets a RAM bump, the Plus model will get it too. Worth noting that this isn't the first time we have seen phones with a little lower RAM not getting AI features. Google did the same thing when it brought Gemini Nano to its Pixel 8 Pro, which comes with 12 GB of RAM.

The regular Pixel 8 (curr. $549 on Amazon), on the other hand, has 8 GB of RAM, so it got left out at launch. Google eventually brought Gemini Nano support to the lower-end phone, and the recently launched Pixel 8a, which has the same amount of memory, also comes with the support. Hopefully, Apple will do something similar for its iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Plus.