Apple has worked hard to separate the iPhone and iPhone Pro lines in order to justify the increased price of the Pro phones without compromising the potential of the vanilla iPhone. But the distinction between the two could radically change later this year, and it's all because of AI.
Google's launch of the Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro comes just weeks after the launch of the iPhone 15 family, marking the beginning of a very public race to put AI in smartphones. Google hopes Pixel will be the first “AI-first” smartphone, Samsung's Galaxy AI will take the majority of stage time at the launch of the Galaxy S24 family, and other manufacturers and suppliers will also lean heavily towards artificial intelligence. was.
The iPhone seems to have missed the AI ​​revolution thanks to Apple launching the iPhone 15 before this Android avalanche. If you take a closer look at how Apple has added features to the iPhone, you'll see AI used in Siri, Computational Photography, and AutoCorrect. These are all valid, but not “sexy”.
AI won't just happen overnight. Understanding the principles behind AI, programming the software, and developing the hardware takes time. We'll talk about how much effort Apple is putting into developing his Generative AI system and how long-term plans he has to release Apple AI at the start of the 2024 product cycle in another article. I will explain. What is clear is that the iPhone 16 family will ship with a variety of generative AI systems, both locally and in the cloud. These will be explained in more detail at Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference in June.
Running generative AI locally requires a significant amount of processing power. The latest Android chipsets from Qualcomm, Mediatek, and Samsung all feature dedicated hardware for generative AI, making the process more efficient in terms of both speed and energy required. It's worth noting that even going back one generation to the 2023 chipset limits the ability to run AI on the handset, leaving you with no choice but to use the cloud or not offer these features at all via software updates. That's almost never the case.
So we go through the iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Pro, and then we arrive at the iPhone 16. Apple has been working on bringing clean air between the specifications of its Vanilla and Pro devices over the past few years. Last year's iPhone 15 shipped with Apple's A16 chipset, while the iPhone 15 Pro shipped with his A17 Pro. This is a clear generation between the two core mobile phones.
As Apple looks to put AI (as consumers currently understand it) into the iPhone, there is every expectation that Apple will want to do as much processing as possible on the device, and no doubt all of its marketing materials will We cite the privacy benefits of this. As Android manufacturers have discovered, if you want smooth on-device AI, you need hardware support in the chipset.
Thankfully, Apple has a new A17 chipset available for its 2024 iPhone family, and the A17 will almost certainly come with specific hardware dedicated to processing generative AI. Now, the question is how to handle the artificial specifications split between two phones.
I very much doubt that Apple will limit AI to just the iPhone 16 Pro and 16 Pro Max. Apple AI must be fully available on all new devices. If that's the case, Apple will need to push the iPhone 16 higher up the ladder than many expected at this time last year. It's not enough to match his A17 in the current Pro model, the iPhone 16 will also need similar AI hardware capabilities.
The iPhone 16 is going to be significantly more powerful, and it's all thanks to AI.
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