Supported Devices

As cool as these Apple Intelligence features sound, there’s one big catch. Apple is taking its privacy mandate very seriously, to the point where it wants to do as much on-device as possible without allowing folks with older devices to fall back to cloud-based processing.

This means that Apple Intelligence will be limited to only the latest iPhone models with an A17 Pro or newer chip. Right now, that’s the iPhone 15 Pro, although the entire iPhone 16 lineup will naturally be on board this fall. For the iPad and Mac, any M1 or later chip qualifies.

While older devices could theoretically rely on Apple’s Private Cloud Compute architecture, it seems that the company doesn’t want to bear this burden since it would presumably require everything from older devices to be sent to Apple’s servers. In addition to the matter of scalability, there would also undoubtedly be performance issues here that would make that impractical, creating potentially painful delays while waiting for data to be exchanged with Apple’s cloud servers.

After all, we saw remarkable speed improvements when Apple moved Siri to on-device processing in iOS 15 (for those devices that were capable of it). Considering how much more sophisticated the AI-enhanced Siri will be in iOS 18, it’s fair to say that local processing of requests is crucial to a natural experience.