Jobs Mob has said that its Apple Intelligence AI features are exclusive to the iPhone 15 Pro, iPads, and Macs with Apple Silicon. The excuse is that only those with Apple silicon have enough computing power to support Apple Intelligence.

During WWDC 2024's The Talk Show, Apple's AI chief John Giannandrea, marketing head Greg Joswiak, and software leader Craig Federighi explained to John Gruber of Daring Fireball that older devices “lack the hardware” to run these AI models effectively.

Just so Apple fanboys don’t start asking questions about it, Jobs’ Mob has been using big AI words like “inference” to explain.

For those unaware, inference is a 16th-century word that AI people have dug up. do use algorithms and statistical models to process new information and make determinations.

Giannandrea said running AI models requires significant computational resources. The device's bandwidth, the size of the Apple Neural Engine, and the overall power are crucial to perform these tasks swiftly. While running the models on older devices is technically possible, the performance would be slow.

Of course, there are no guarantees that Apple’s new hardware is any faster. In fact, even with the most optimistic tests of the new chips, it is not that much different from older machines.

When quizzed by hacks who suspected that it was just a sales tactic designed to befuddle the terminally stupid who make up Apple’s target market to upgrade,  Joswiak came up with a fudge.

He said: “that if that were the case, Apple would have made the latest iPads and Macs mandatory as well.”

Federighi emphasised that Apple Intelligence's advanced nature necessitates modern hardware. He remarked on the remarkable capability of running such powerful models on an iPhone and how it had a beautiful plumage.

The A17 Pro chip, exclusive to the iPhone 15 Pro, has a 16-core Neural Engine, double the capacity of the A16 Bionic found in the standard iPhone 15.  However, since most AI processing is conducted online, extra hardware is less likely to be needed.

Apple’s flashy Neural Engine is more likely to support the increasing demands of tasks on its devices such as energy efficiency and performance and an upgrade is not required for that.