RIP to All MacBooks Before M1, Here’s the Compatibility List for Apple Intelligence
What is Apple Intelligence? Is it just a ChatGPT wrapper or something more? Once again, Apple has taken something and taken its own spin at it. Apple Intelligence is a new suite of AI-powered features for Apple devices. It’s not a singular app, like Copilot or ChatGPT, but rather a whole range of features that come integrated into the current Apple system apps.
Right now, the list of supported devices is rather small, with only the very top version of the iPhone, the 15 Pro and 15 Pro Max, as well as any Mac device with an M1 or newer SoC. This is largely because of the NPUs that are inside. The iPhone 15 and 14 Pro utilize the Apple A16 Bionic, which has only 16 TOPS (trillion operations per second) of performance. The Apple A17 Pro inside the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max carries 35 TOPS of power all in your phone. It’s weird though that the M1 gets in, with an NPU carrying only 11 TOPS of power.
Compatible devices
Is Apple trying to create AI FOMO in order to force users to upgrade their phones in order to receive these new features? It would fit their usual M.O. of gatekeeping features in order to make users switch devices. Right now, the announced Apple Intelligence features include text generation, suggesting edits, proofreading and more.
You can also edit photos on your phone with diffusion models, and remove objects with smart object detection and generative fill, which we’ve been using before, but now they’ll be more powerful and faster. One thing we really like is the new Genmojis. Basically, you can use AI to describe an emoji, and your device would generate it from scratch.
For tasks that would benefit massively from ChatGPT, Apple will ask if it can send the request to an Open AI server, where it would get processed and returned while hiding your IP and other data so there’s still some privacy. Elon still wasn’t happy though and went on a healthy rant on Twitter / X. We covered it, while also directing the privacy promises that Apple has made with Apple Intelligence.