The Best iOS 27 AI Features Will Require an iPhone 17 Pro

During today’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) keynote, Apple unveiled iOS 27 and the rest of its operating systems more tacitly than usual. Rather than taking us through each platform sequentially, as it usually does, the company chose to present what’s coming to the unified ecosystem this fall, including Siri AI, other new Apple Intelligence features, and expanded child safety controls.

Apple’s operating systems were mentioned, of course, but mostly in passing. In retrospect, we should have seen this coming, as last year’s unification of version numbers and the Liquid Glass aesthetic took the already blurred lines between the iPhone and iPad and added the Mac and Vision Pro into the mix.

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Nevertheless, iOS 27 is still very much its own operating system for iPhone users, and when Apple’s VP of OS Program Management, Stacey Ford, took the virtual stage, she confirmed that iOS 27 won’t be leaving any iPhones behind when it comes out later this year.

While noting that Apple has baked a new and more advanced CPU scheduler into this year’s operating systems, the company also worked to bring it to older iPhone models — all the way back to the iPhone 11. That was the same cutoff point for iOS 26, so if your iPhone is running last year’s release, you’ll be getting this year’s also.

However, that doesn’t mean you’ll be getting everything that iOS 27 has to offer. Apple Intelligence features remain the exclusive domain of Apple’s iPhone 15 Pro and newer models, and while all these devices will still be eligible for most of the new AI features, Apple is raising the bar to another level for some of the most demanding new features.

In a surprise twist, Craig Federighi noted that some of the most advanced features, like Siri’s expressive voices and advanced dictation would be limited to only three current iPhone models: the iPhone 17 Pro, iPhone 17 Pro Max, and iPhone Air.

While Federighi expressed this in marketing-speak, the slide shown explicitly listed the iPhone Air, iPhone 17 Pro, iPad with M4 and later, and Mac with M3 and later “with 12 GB or more in memory.”

Since the “most powerful on-device model” is undoubtedly more memory hungry, it’s not hard to surmise that the baseline here isn’t so much the SoC itself as the RAM — especially since Apple calls that out so explicitly for the iPad and Mac. It also explains why the iPhone 17 is missing from the list and why the iPad requires an M4 while the Mac can get by with an M3 — as long as it has 12 GB of RAM.

While Apple offers multiple RAM configurations for most of its Macs (the notable exception being this year’s MacBook Neo, which comes in a single 8 GB configuration), the iPhone and the iPad use fixed RAM configurations based on the A-series or M-series chip inside — and the M3 iPad Air and base A19 chip still pack in only 8 GB of unified memory.

The A19 Pro was the first iPhone chip to get a bump to 12 GB, while the M4 iPads had a slightly weirder journey. When Apple debuted its first M4-powered iPad Pro models in early 2024, it split the RAM configurations based on storage capacity — the 256 GB and 512 GB models only had 8 GB of RAM, while the 1 TB and 2 TB versions got a bump all the way to 16 GB. When Apple brought the M4 chip to the iPad Air earlier this year, it split the difference, giving it 12 GB across the board.

In practical terms, this means you won’t be getting the flagship Apple Intelligence features in iPadOS 27 unless you opted for at least a 1 TB M4 iPad Pro or picked up this year’s M4 iPad Air.

In some ways, this echoes the 2024 debut of Apple Intelligence, when it was limited to the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max, conspicuously leaving out the standard iPhone 15 models. Many speculated at the time that this was mostly about RAM — the A17 Pro was the first iPhone chip to get 8 GB of RAM, while the A16 Bionic in the iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Plus packed in only 6 GB. However, Apple Intelligence did — and still does — run on a 2020-era M1 MacBook Air, which has a Neural Engine that operates at only 11 trillion operations per second (TOPS), compared to the A16 chip’s 17 TOPS. By that metric, the A16 should have been more than capable of handling Apple Intelligence in terms of raw processing power — but it lacked the RAM necessary for the large language models to breathe.

The same now applies to Apple’s new on-device Foundation Model. More advanced dictation and an expressive and conversational Siri naturally requires additional breathing room, and 8 GB just doesn’t cut it anymore.