Apple Intelligence aims to be the perfect excuse for something important for the future: selling more iPhones

Apple’s artificial intelligence will soon appear in beta versions of iOS 18, iPadOS 18 and macOS Sequoia, but only a portion of current iPhone owners will be able to try it. Cause? To do this, you’ll need an iPhone 15 Pro or iPhone 15 Pro Max. The decision does not seem arbitrary at all.

NPU is the key. If you don’t have one of these two models, you won’t be able to access the features Apple offers with its new AI system. The company explained that in order to take advantage of Apple Intelligence, it is necessary to have chips with a sufficiently powerful NPU (Neural Processing Unit). According to the company, of Apple’s mobile chips, only the latest A17 Pro has such power.

Why not in the previous ones? Apple doesn’t explain exactly why you can’t take advantage of these options on the iPhone 15/Plus, for example. The A16 Bionic are truly great chips, but the AI ​​features probably don’t have enough room to run smoothly, and here Apple chose to avoid complaints of a disappointing experience. The other possibility, of course, is that they want to use this requirement as an argument to sell more iPhones in the future.

Your iPhone 13 is no longer useful. The funny thing is that the iPhone can usually access ChatGPT and other chatbots since everything runs in the cloud. This suggests that Apple could simply enable requests on its servers directly for less powerful iPhones that don’t support the local model. As analyst Michael Gartenberg notes in Wired magazine, “I suspect this is the opportunity Apple has been waiting for to tell you the iPhone 13 isn’t good enough anymore.”

Either you change your iPhone or nothing.. This will mean that those who want to access Apple’s Intelligence capabilities will either have to purchase the iPhone 15 Pro/Max or wait for the company’s future models to arrive from now on. If it follows the same trend as in recent years, the upcoming iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Plus will have the Apple A17 Pro, which will allow even these “basic” models to access these features.

Sales will go up. So says Dan Ives, an analyst at Wedbush Securities, who explained that these AI options “should change Cupertino’s growth trajectory: They will drive a cycle of AI-powered iPhone upgrades, starting with iPhone 16.”

But not everywhere. The rollout of these features will be gradual. Initially, they will only be available to US users and in English, which means that potential sales growth may not be as high. Unless, of course, users in the rest of the world also buy it with the expectation that Apple Intelligenge will quickly reach other regions and languages. Apple didn’t specify when it would do this, but confirmed that it’s definitely the plan.

Perfect moment. If this prediction comes true, it will happen at a time when Apple needs it most. iPhone sales have stagnated in recent months and fell sharply in the first quarter of the year. As those responsible for the company explained, iPhones were sold 10% less than in the same period last year, which was the biggest drop in sales since the summer of 2020.

AI to the rescue. The arguments in favor of changing mobile phones have not been so strong for a long time. Almost without changing the design, manufacturers covered themselves mainly with new processors and cameras. People could extend the life of their smartphones, but now AI may be the killer app that can boost sales again. That’s what Apple is probably hoping for.

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