Apple's new AI leaves out more than 90% of current iPhone users

https://english.elpais.com/technology/2024-06-14/apples-new-artificial-intelligence-leaves-out-more-than-90-of-current-iphone-users.html

by geox • 2 years ago

49 86 2 years ago

english.elpais.com

sharpshadow• 2 years ago

Which is good isn't it? My old iPhone without latest updates still works fine.

asimovfan• 2 years ago

Why would you cherish being left out? Wouldn't you want an opt in to online services? You already have siri.

Alifatisk• 2 years ago

I can't remember the last time I used Siri honestly

Jtsummers• 2 years ago

Why would you cherish being left out?

Not suffering from FOMO is a delightful thing. You can enjoy life while others scramble after the “greatest” and latest. There are far more important things to worry about than whether you get ML models running on your phone.

_8nbg2• 2 years ago

I can only be happy for this.

I can't really judge at this point, but I really doubt there is hardware limitation for that, e.g. iPhone 15 Pro isn't so much powerful than iPhone 15. Even when it is - they could utilize their server side AI solution, but for them greed comes first.

jhugo• 2 years ago

Given Apple’s general approach, I suspect it’s on-device and these are the only devices that can currently achieve a good experience. I’d like to see them make the devices work together - having an iPhone, Mac or iPad run the model but access it via a watch or HomePod.

bzzzt• 2 years ago

The local AI model Apple is using needs at least 8Gb. (I guess not all for the AI, but the rest of the phone also needs memory to function)

simonw2• 2 years ago

6GB RAM on the iPhone 15, 8GB on the iPhone 15 Pro.

That 2GB really could make the difference: they have a 3B language model, which is going to be memory hungry. There needs to be enough memory left for the rest of the phone and apps to function.

_8nbg2• 2 years ago

6GB RAM on the iPhone 15, 8GB on the iPhone 15 Pro. That 2GB really could make the difference: they have a 3B language model, which is going to be memory hungry.

Even when it is - they could utilize their server side AI solution, but for them greed comes first.

htrp• 2 years ago

This!

And a reminder that Phi1.5 comes in at 2.8GB.

Getting a performant model even while using aggressive quantization is going to require more RAM.

iPhone 16 ProAI may end up having notebook levels of ram (12 / 16GB)

harrygeez• 2 years ago

For on-device AI as a matter of fact it is. 35 TOPS vs 17 TOPS is quite substantial. For reference Microsoft demands 40+ TOPS for “Copilot+” PCs.

Probably they could offload more to their servers but it wouldn’t be the same experience definitely.

loloquwowndueo• 2 years ago

Good, I don’t want hallucinating AI eating my battery.

I’ll upgrade when the latest OS no longer installs on my iPhone 11 and even then I might not get the latest and greatest - better to wait for my carrier to offer a previous-generation iPhone for peanuts and use that to upgrade.

simonw2• 2 years ago

One of the most interesting things about Apple's design here is that by heavily restricting the ways in which their on-device LLMs are used they've massively reduced the scope for hallucination.

It's far less likely to cause problems when limited to tasks like summaries, copy editing and short text rewording.

Hallucination is most likely to cause headline-grabbing mistakes when you use LLMs to answer questions about the world or generate larger volumes of text from a short prompt. Apple effectively outsource that to a clearly branded ChatGPT integration, neatly assigning any blame for hallucinations to OpenAI.

threesevenths• 2 years ago

Wouldn’t it make sense for Apple to use their server models for users that do not have a 15 Pro? They don’t need to make the feature unavailable.

wepple• 2 years ago

I suspect there’s a few factors preventing that - cost of server capacity, the UX of higher latency (it would be for possibly all ML stuff?)

seanhunter• 2 years ago

Presumably they want existing iPhone owners to have a compelling reason to upgrade to the newer model.

sneak• 2 years ago

100%. It is likely that they will. The current on-device stuff is going to (obviously) be gated to the fastest devices presently.

I imagine they will roll out to other languages and devices relatively soon after. This article assumes too much about the future, and seems to be pushing an “Apple wants to sell you more hardware” narrative as if a hardware company wanting sales is somehow scandalous.

Despite that, I don’t think that is what is happening here. I imagine server models will be available across all/most devices not long after they do the initial launch.

paulmd3• 2 years ago

Apple specifically avoids building solutions which put them in the position of being able to do lawful intercepts. I am convinced it is an explicit checkbox in their development process now.

If you’ve built the solution for commercial purposes you obviously don’t have any real moral concerns that can allow you to refuse a lawful request, while “build us a backdoor to unlock this iPhone” or “build us a backdoor to disable advanced data protection mode/e2ee mode” would be compelled speech.

The things they have complied on are fairly minor stuff like making airdrop not work with non-friends for more than 10 minutes at a time.

There are obvious privacy problems with streaming every user interaction to the cloud, which is why they’ve already avoided this for things like photo tagging etc. Maybe you could do anonymized inference similar to the way maps work (let’s say, apple hosts a session for an anonymized user identifier but they don’t know who) but it’s still very intimate information regardless.

On device really is better… not to mention the power concerns. Like I just do not get these objections at all, other than whining because it’s apple, and I think the same people would be whining 100x harder (with good justification) if apple was really steaming every user interaction to the cloud. We’d be hearing about the sham of apple marketing on privacy while sending your sexts to the cloud etc.

same thing for the whining about copilot. Like yeah if it’s on-device it ultimately is going to be a file on disk somewhere (omg SQLite, we hate that!!!). The whole disk is protected by bitlocker, and the file is additionally restricted tightly to the system user (not just admin, the kernel privileged user). The file has to be open during normal operation, so “double encrypting” the file an additional time and then storing the encryption key inside the PC is security theater, because the file has to be opened anyway, and everyone knows this and would immediately spout off if anyone did it in any other circumstance. Yes, if you force your way to system user you can read the file, because the system user needs to read it, but at that point the system user can also just keylog you and screenshot you directly.

The complaints people are raising aren’t technically cogent, but they don’t need to be, because they’re not technically based in the first place. People don’t want the feature and they find reasons to complain. You can 10x it anytime apple is involved.

verticalscaler• 2 years ago

It is almost like they only came out with this to appease wall street.

I'll just remind you about one of the features: You heard of Memojis, now you have Genmoji!

Generating a squirrel on a jetski emoji on the fly will save you loads of time and make your life better. There aren't enough stickers in your chat app.

Pick from three googley eyed cartoon styles to show off your unique personalities and creativity.

They all look like Pixar and smarmy Dreamworks face nightmare fuel memes from over a decade ago (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DreamWorksFace).

This was an actual part of the demo. I'm not being factitious.

red2awn• 2 years ago

It is exactly what this is, pleasing the shareholders. From Tim Cook himself: https://youtu.be/pMX2cQdPubk?t=146

It became clear that people wanted to know our views on generative AI. So we decided to embrace it and call it Apple Intelligence.

pzo• 2 years ago

I'm quite disappointed with latest WWDC - for developers they haven't thrown any bone or carrot. I was hoping they would allow for developers to run prompts locally even if not on iPhone then at least on M1 iPads/Macbooks. Sort of like preinstalled LLM with ollama. There are many ideas that could be useful for user but hard to pull off because of either business model and/or latency.

everdrive• 2 years ago

Finally some good news. I'm very thankful that this is not available to my iPhone.

epolanski2• 2 years ago

Not seeing the logic here..

Wouldn't it be better it was available and you turned it off I'd you didn't want to use it?

alamortsubite2• 2 years ago

How do you feel about all the manufacturer bloatware installed on Windows PCs? After all, you can turn it all off if you don't want to use it.

pllbnk• 2 years ago

It will most likely be there in the binary but you just won't be able to turn it on.

thih9• 2 years ago

That's consistent with their past releases. First version of Siri worked only on the newly launched iPhone 4s too.

rs_rs_rs_rs_rs• 2 years ago

Since it's not ready yet I think "Apple beta tests new AI features on 10% of the current iPhone users".

KingOfCoders2• 2 years ago

That's the plan. Money needs to come somewhere, Apple has perfect the upgrade game (slowing phones down, new features, ...) when essentially every phone is the same since some years (I have a Mi 11 Ultra and it's the first phone I'll never upgrade before it breaks).

supermatt3• 2 years ago

What LLM are you running on your Mi 11 ultra?

theGeatZhopa3• 2 years ago

It's not about running an LLM on a device, it's about the hardware - which is quite good and long lasting. In both cases, the hardware is good. But apple has been caught to slow down their phones so the incentive to buy a new one is higher (like the scandal slow down because of the battery usage of new features.. etc..)

The OG just stated to keep his Mi 11 ultra until it degrades, because he/she/it is happy with it and there won't be such games like making it slow or bring you somehow into situation that you need to buy a new iPhone, like now apple does - buy a new if you want to have LLM..

Also, what LLMs are running on your apple device that is not within the 100-90%=10% of all iPhones and other iDevices?

OG can use android apps for that, if he needs LLM or other features of AI. It's even possible to side load them. Which is not possible and not sure for Apple. You can ask a question:

If a feature is built in into iOS, is it possible to write an app for iOS and having this accepted for AppStore? Look up the terms for developers. It's written: no.

So having apple introduce their AI solution, which is built in and sitting on top of openAI... No other app will be accepted that's doing the same . Nor will the apps have deep integration into the OS, because Apple doesn't want it. They also won't change their minds on it.

So this is the point of OP. It's not to be answered with in a sense "so? Then tell me what LLMs are running on your Mi11... Because there aren't and Apple now introduced local LLMs.." are you an Apple fanboy/fan girl?

KingOfCoders2• 2 years ago

Currently none b/c I think every NPU you can currently buy will be rapidly old tech. It's like iPhone 1 (had one), iPhone 2 (3G, had one) [...], iPod 1 (hard drive, had one), iPod 2 (had one) [...], or MacBook Pro 1 (white, had one), MacBook Pro 2 (aluminium , had one), [...] all rapidly changing over the first generations.

After some iterations of something truly new, as (local) LLMs, things will slow down.

joefarish• 2 years ago

Some very cynical comments on this thread. Maybe, just maybe the older hardware isn't really capable of running these features properly and it's not some evil conspiracy to "force" users into upgrading?

Aaargh20318• 2 years ago

It’s the amount of RAM that matters. It’s supported on the M1 but not on the A14. Both have the same CPU core design and neural engine, including the same number of neural engine cores. The A14, however, has 4 or 6GB RAM while the M1 has at least 8GB.

As the models used can be quite large this probably means the A14 doesn’t have enough headroom for it give a good UX.

web3-is-a-scam• 2 years ago

Why not both?

theshrike794• 2 years ago

Lack of memory (2GB less) and lack of power in the ML unit (A17 Pro has double the power of the previous one) are the deciding factors.

CSMastermind• 2 years ago

I just hope they move lidar sensors to the non-pro models soon.

WolfCop2• 2 years ago

Where’s the source of this info? I can’t find it in the article.

tibbydudeza• 2 years ago

Only for the A17 processor sold in their Pro line.

manojlds• 2 years ago

iPhone 15 Pro Line

WolfCop2• 2 years ago

I might be missing it, but I don’t see a link to that info from Apple in the article.

But I did just find this, which confirms what you’re saying. https://www.apple.com/apple-intelligence/

RamblingCTO• 2 years ago

Yeah obviously? They only started shipping hardware for that from what, starting with the iPhone 15?

Hamuko2• 2 years ago

No?

The iPhone 14 Pro also had a 16-core NPU. The biggest difference is that Apple claims that the iPhone 15 Pro is "up to 2x faster" for machine learning than the iPhone 14 Pro.

larusso2• 2 years ago

I don‘t get what they really complain about here? I mean first it’s Apple. They didn’t introduce a new paid service but a service which will be free to iPhone users this fall. And I strongly assume it will be iPhone 15Pro, iPhone16 and iPhone 16Pro by that time. So people can either upgrade to an older pro model or get the newest hottest device.

Second: When VW produces a new car nobody complains that the million drivers won’t get an update automatically. And even if we would say VW introduces a new AI parking system or whatever would it mean everybody would get it. I think the server side solution could work on older devices but that is rarely what Apple does. Also they specifically split the whole AI presentation from all the others features coming to iOS, macOS etc. not like millions of users won’t get anything with the next update.

haunter• 2 years ago

When VW produces a new car nobody complains that the million drivers won’t get an update automatically.

Terrible comparison because

1, Car makers doesn’t release new cars every single year

2, For most people a car is the 2nd biggest investment after their house which is nowhere near a smartphone in cost (that most people get subsidized by their carrier)

ianhawes• 2 years ago

1. Car makers doesn’t release new cars every single year

They do. The 4 numbers that typically start with 20 or sometimes 19 indicate the model year of a vehicle which does change periodically.

larusso2• 2 years ago

It’s about the fact that the current install base (which also goes into the millions) won‘t get stuff for free.

If Apple is doing it for pushing sales (Mac users with an m1 will get it without hardware upgrades and these devices are over 3 years old by the time of release) is anybodies guess.

lxgr2• 2 years ago

smartphone in cost (that most people get subsidized by their carrier)

In almost all cases, this is nothing but an intransparent form of installment payments, coupled with a carrier lock-in that helps keep prices high (because most people or even families can only switch ever other year or so).

Maybe it’s still very common in the US, but many people have moved on from this.

DennisP2• 2 years ago

There's always something to complain about. If the AI runs on servers then oh no there's no privacy. If it runs locally then oh no it won't run on my old hardware.

Given Apple's general emphasis on privacy and selling hardware, this seems like the right path for them. Personally I'm all for it.

Hamuko2• 2 years ago

But it's going to run on servers anyways, both Apple's and OpenAI's.

theshrike794• 2 years ago

It's purely about compute power[0]. The A17 Pro has 35 TOPS of Neural Engine performance, A16 Bionic has 17. A15 has 15.8.

The M-series have less performance, but I think they're compensated by being in iPads where they can use more power (battery) without impacting people's lives too much.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A17

bhj2• 2 years ago

It’s about RAM, I think. Only A17 Pro has 8GB, which we can infer is the new baseline.

hmottestad• 2 years ago

I was thinking the other day that it’s taken OpenAI quite a bit of time to bring out GPT-4o for free to users. Even paying users have limits of how much they could use GTP-4 and GPT-4 Turbo.

For Apple to build out a dedicated server farm to accommodate even 50% of all their current users would be extremely challenging. I think they need users to run an LLM locally just simply because they wouldn’t be able to handle the amount of compute it would require to handle every request server-side.

I’m very interesting to see how local AI will impact the amount of RAM that comes standard with their Macs and iPhones. The 12 year old Macbook I still have in a cupboard somewhere has 16 GB of RAM. That was max at the time, but today 128 GB is max while they still offer 8 GB. If they had done that 12 years ago they would have been offering 1, 2, 4, 8 and 16 GB of memory.

epolanski2• 2 years ago

Yep, same here. 2012 MBP with 16GBs and they trying to sell me 8Gbs MBP as base in 2024..

paulmd3• 2 years ago

For Apple to build out a dedicated server farm to accommodate even 50% of all their current users would be extremely challenging

fyi there have been rumors that apple is looking to scale out Mac Pro production for their own server farms to support this. Since ultra is a super niche product normally this obviously is going to be like, several orders of magnitude of increase here.

Obviously there is the conventional wisdom that apple doesn’t do server and the server market doesn’t do apple, and they may continue to prefer commodity/off-the-shelf server hardware for the bulk of their iCloud infra, but things may be different with the bottleneck on AI hardware at the moment.

mike_tyson• 2 years ago

wowzers, gonna need to buy the new iphone pro so i can use Apple Intelligence to generate those delightful new genmojis

dailykoder• 2 years ago

Don't forget the message answer predictions. Otherwise you wouldn't know what to say to your friends, duh!

kd913• 2 years ago

There is this new AI features, but I feel there was also a bigger reason to upgrade that was almost completely ignored.

A huge set of media companies have shifted to using AV1 and these older devices are gonna get hammered for battery.

I was planning on upgrading anyway just to get hardware AV1 decode given youtube music/youtube are one of my most frequent apps.

Surprised there wasn't more furore when Google mandated that shift.

antonkochubey• 2 years ago

A huge set of media companies have shifted to using AV1

Such as? Most YouTube videos I am watching are still VP9 at 1080p/1440p, and there's no reason to watch 4K on phones (you still can, but lower battery life is your own choice in that case).

anshumankmr• 2 years ago

I am also pissed that despite having an iPhone 15 Plus, I am not able to get this new feature.

tr3ntg• 2 years ago

What's the limitation in your case?

weikju• 2 years ago

Only the 15 pro line will get it, not the plain iPhone

submeta• 2 years ago

Only the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max — out of the 24 models compatible with the new iOS 18 — will be able to run Apple Intelligence.

Prices are above 1200 EUR in Germany. Err, no. I'll stick to ChatGPT and Claude.

---

Perplexity.ai:

The iPhone 15 Pro in Germany costs:

For the 6.1-inch model:

- 128GB storage: €1,299[1][2][3]

- 256GB storage: €1,399[1][2][3]

For the 6.7-inch Pro Max model:

- 256GB storage: €1,499[2][4]

These prices are for an unlocked, SIM-free iPhone purchased directly from retailers like Coolblue, MediaMarkt, and the Apple online store in Germany. The prices include VAT but no carrier contract.[1][2][3][4]

Citations: [1] https://www.coolblue.de/en/mobile-phones/smartphones/apple/a... [2] https://www.mediamarkt.de/de/brand/apple/iphone/iphone-15-pr... [3] https://www.apple.com/de/shop/buy-iphone/iphone-15-pro [4] https://www.apple.com/de/shop/buy-iphone/iphone-15-pro/6,7%2... [5] https://www.apple.com/de/shop/buy-iphone/iphone-15-pro/6,1%2...

unpopularopp2• 2 years ago

But why would anyone buy a phone upfront when you can get them subsidized by the carrier with data and talk? I end up paying the same after 22 months but I also get more. Last phone I bought upfront was 20 years ago when WAP was still a thing.

jonathantf2• 2 years ago

Because then the carrier charge about 10x what they'd charge a SIM only customer for the data, and it usually ends up costing more for the handset going through finance than buying it outright

MissTake• 2 years ago

Because not everyone has access to those sorts of plans.

In addition such plans, when they are available, invariably lock you in for a set period committing you to regular payments. Either that or the “free phone” is paid back out of the term of the contract thus still requiring you to pay full price at the get go.

This is how it goes, at least here in the USA.

lxgr2• 2 years ago

What do you think carriers subsidize phones from, if not the implicit surcharge embedded into vastly overpriced and inflexible long-term contracts?

I’ve bought every iPhone I’ve owned without a contract both in Europe and the US and have come out ahead after 24 months every single time.

I don’t think Apple actually sells them to carriers at a meaningful discount vs. retail. If they do, that makes it an even worse deal.

shallichange• 2 years ago

Makes me want a dumb phone with just Google maps and WhatsApp even more. (WhatsApp is the de facto standard everywhere out of USA)

kotaKat• 2 years ago

It may "leave out" more than 90% of "current" users, but there's still the upgrade cycle a lot of us are going to be walking right into this fall.

As an iPhone 14 Pro owner that's been stuck in a carrier agreement for the past couple of years, there hasn't been any "incentive" for me to upgrade, and I'm naturally at my upgrade point now. I'll likely be going to a 16 Pro no matter what.

paulmd3• 2 years ago

Microsoft needs hardware for their “AI pc” too, this is nothing new and the only alternatives are server-side (which people will complain about even more) or extremely slow performance which will chew up battery (which, guess what, people complain about even more).

People are looking to find fault with apple and are going to construct a reason to be upset no matter what. It’s literally every single thread that mentions apple at all, just wildly unfair attacks and special-pleading and arguments from perfectionism that no other vendor is ever held to.

We really, really need to come to terms with these problems around apple discourse, it is so bad-faith and so noxious every single time. I don’t mean mod action but as long as people keep tolerating it and encouraging it and especially the whole “apple sheeple” “people who buy apple are doing it because they’re morons chasing blue bubbles” etc needs to not be on a site like this, and that is going to require people in the communities to stop tolerating it.

ryandvm• 2 years ago

For some reason the ChatGPT app on OS X also requires Apple silicon. Not sure why since it's just talking to an API.

newscracker• 2 years ago

I think it’s a poor decision by Apple if Apple Intelligence running on Apple’s Private Cloud Compute is not available on even a one year old phone like iPhone 15/15 Plus or a two year old iPhone 14 Pro/Pro Max.

Since this service is launching as beta later in the year and is limited to US English, it seems like just a beginning. Anybody buying an iPhone 16 or iPhone 15 Pro just for this may be in for a rude awakening when they’re left out next year with iPhone 17 getting better features on AI.

I agree with Mark Gurman when he says — in this piece [1] titled “ Apple’s Push to Infuse Devices With AI Will Take Years to Pay Off” — that the current plan of release isn’t going to fuel an iPhone sales supercycle for the iPhone 16 series.

[1] https://archive.ph/srPHa

beretguy• 2 years ago

Awesome! Thank you! I still have some time to enjoy devices without AI.

Apple's new AI leaves out more than 90% of current iPhone users

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