This week, Apple will unveil the iPhone 17 Pro, alongside the rest of the iPhone 17 family. Tim Cook will take to the stage to introduce the new hardware and demonstrate Apple’s vision of the smartphone. It’s a vision that will undoubtedly include the use of artificial intelligence on mobiles.
And that is the Achilles Heel of not just the new iPhone family, but Apple’s entire approach to AI in 2025 and beyond. The rest of the market has defined AI to be something different to Apple’s strategy. The totemic power of Apple is running out of time to reset expectations around AI to its own advantage.
The iPhone 17 Pro Versus Android’s AI
During the launch of the Pixel 8 family in 2023, Google christened the new approach as the first “AI Smartphone.” It brought a significant number of AI features to the public, some running on the Pixel and other, more important features, running in the cloud. Nevertheless, consumers had a seamless AI experience that met and exceeded expectations.
Other Android manufacturers followed suit. They used many of the supplied AI functionality from Google before adding their own on top, such as Samsung’s Now Bar.
Last month, Google clearly demonstrated its vision for the future of mobile AI with the launch of the Pixel 10 and Pixel 10 Pro. While the hardware upgrades were very much a “keeping pace with technology”, the software changes brought its agentic-AI approach into clear focus, with Magic Cue the most prominent signpost.
The iPhone 17 Pro And Apple Intelligence
Apple’s situation with consumer AI is far from rosy. From the launch of the Pixel 8 family to Apple’s announcement of its approach to the new world of AI took eight months. That came at its Worldwide Developer Conference in May 2024.
The Apple Intelligence revolution was expected to arrive with the iPhone 16. A few features demoed at WWDC did. Some of the key services, such as a personalized Siri, remain substantially missing. The lack of material progress from the demos at that WWDC was called out by the Apple community, with notable commentator John Gruber going so far as to call the demos “vapourware”:
“That level is called vaporware. They were features Apple said existed, which they claimed would be shipping in the next year, and which they portrayed, to great effect, in the signature “Siri, when is my mom’s flight landing?” segment of the WWDC keynote itself, starting around the 1h:22m mark. Apple was either unwilling or unable to demonstrate those features in action back in June, even with Apple product marketing reps performing the demos from a prepared script using prepared devices.
The awkwardly backronymed Apple Intelligence has fallen behind the competition. While the basic blocks of generative AI are present, the promises of deep integration, personalized services, and an AI that just works, which were made at WWDC in 2024, have not been delivered.
Keeping Your iPhone 17 Pro Data Secure
Apple has a long-standing commitment to user privacy, which makes it challenging to replicate Android’s prowess with mobile artificial intelligence. Apple Intelligence has a fundamental trade-off. By keeping as much data as possible on the iPhone, the raw power and expansive data sets available to cloud-based AI are not feasible, limiting the scope of what can be achieved locally. The competition can offload more AI work to server-side processing, and with it, an uplift in accuracy, speed, and capability.
Apple does use cloud-based servers to process AI with its Private Cloud Compute system. This allows an AI request to be made anonymously to the cloud, with certain safeguards in place, such as stateless processing (removing the data from the server after processing), data minimisation (sending only the bare minimum of context-specific data to the cloud), and verifiable privacy.
Yet PCC has limitations compared to the fully cloud-based systems the Android ecosystem uses. Because it is architectured for privacy, it is not able to offer deep and persistent personalisation, and it cannot continuously analyse user data in the cloud to be reactive to users’ needs.
It all has to happen inside the iPhone. And with the best will in the world, even the upcoming A19 Pro, which will drive the iPhone 17 Pro and 17 Pro Max, can’t beat a server farm.
The Challenge Facing The iPhone 17 Pro
Apple’s philosophy of keeping user data secure makes it almost impossible to compete with Google and Android in the same space. It doesn’t work; the last two years have illustrated that.
This is where the main challenge for Apple is over the next year. The launch of the iPhone 17, iPhone 17 Air, iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max is the last realistic opportunity for Tim Cook and his team to have a noticeable impact on the conversation around AI on smartphones. It needs to sell the idea that artificial intelligence is really personal intelligence… where it is personal to you. Not shared with the cloud, not having consumers’ data actioned in the moment, and not being used to train AI at scale.
Tim Cook needs the conversation to change away from the current discourse to a space where Apple has an advantage: on-device processing, controlled cloud access, prioritising personal information rather than exposing privacy to the cloud.
Change that conversation, and you can change the course of AI. The iPhone 17 Pro and its brethren may be the last opportunity for Apple to do so.
Now read the latest leaks and pricing details for the iPhone 17 Pro…
