GoKawiilAlmost two years after Apple first showed off a video promoting the new Siri and lots of exciting new Apple Intelligence features, that future has finally arrived – at least in first beta form.
The company had a lot of ground to make up. Obviously, the test will be how well the new features work in real life usage, but let’s start with what seemed to me to be the most important things the company announced …
The big iPhone support question
For me, one of the biggest questions to arise from the keynote was exactly what features will require the iPhone 17 Pro and up?
Apple had three things to say about iPhone support. The first says that any phone capable of running iOS 26 can be upgraded to iOS 27. That means all the way back to the iPhone 11.
The second is at the new AI features only extend back to the iPhone 15 Pro:
Apple Intelligence and Siri AI in iOS 27, iPadOS 27, macOS 27, watchOS 27, and visionOS 27 are available on iPhone 16 models or later, iPhone 15 Pro, iPhone 15 Pro Max.
The third says that some features are limited to just the latest and greatest models.
Apple’s most powerful on-device model and the features it enables, like expressive voices and more advanced dictation, are available on iPhone Air, iPhone 17 Pro, iPhone 17 Pro Max.
The word ‘like’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting there: it means we don’t yet know what other features will fall into this category. Additionally, it’s not yet 100% clear whether phones that can’t perform these actions on-device will still get access to the same features, just relying on cloud connectivity.
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