The highly anticipated launch of the new iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Pro takes place on September 10, but new details on next year’s iPhone 17 ask some difficult questions of Apple’s AI strategy.
Multiple sources, including supply chain analyst Jeff Pu and reliable Weibo leaker “Phone Chip Expert” have highlighted that next year’s iPhone 17 family will all ship with 12 GB of RAM to support on-device generative AI software. That’s 4 GB more than the limited memory shipping with next month’s cohort.
Apple may be ready to pitch the iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Pro as the first AI-focused iPhones, but the memory restrictions on the upcoming model suggest that Tim Cook and his team will heavily promote Apple Intelligence, even if the ground has not been fully prepared for local processing.
Apple is expected to equalise most iPhone 16, 16 Plus, 16 Pro, and 16 Pro specifications. This includes the Apple Silicon, where the vanilla models have been pushed to be a generation behind the Pro models. That won’t be the case for the iPhone 16 family. Apple’s push toward generative AI demands the latest A18 silicon across the four handsets. However, the two Pro models are expected to have more GPU capabilities in the chipset than the vanilla models.
This also includes the memory. Where the vanilla models have shipped with less memory than the pro models (recently by 25 percent), the current thinking is that the iPhone 16 range will be 8 GB across all four models. And for many Apple watchers, that amount of memory will be a problem.
The proposed higher memory of 12 GB across the iPhone 17 family will be needed to run a significant volume of artificial intelligence routines on the handset, which means more processing of personal data on the device rather than in the cloud. Yet these handsets won’t be on sale for 12 months.
With just 8 GB for each of the iPhone 16 models, the more intensive Apple Intelligence features will be offloaded and handled by Apple’s cloud-based servers. Far from delivering generative artificial intelligence, the iPhone 16 family will be a curious halfway house as Apple seeks to match the Android experience under iOS.
For all the expected talk from the stage at The Steve Jobs Theatre of the iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Pro being Apple’s AI smartphones, the specs tell another story. The iPhones will launch without any generative AI on board; only a basic AI implementation will arrive in October; and when the full package arrives, hopefully in Q1 2025, the top-tier iPhones will not have enough memory to run as many services on the device as the privacy-conscious Apple may hope for.
The iPhone 16 family may come with AI, but it is only a tentative step towards AI. The full response to Android’s dominance in this space won’t arrive until 2025.
Now read which Apple device is going to offer more value for money than the iPhone 16 Pro…
