It’s common knowledge that companies tend to make big promises when they’re trying to sell you something. Sometimes those promises are delivered. Sometimes they’re not. And if you’re a multi-trillion-dollar company with an exceptionally loyal fanbase, you can often get away with a lot more than most. I’m sure you’ve understood who I am talking about.
Take the promised overhaul of a voice assistant for instance, that in its current form, can drive users mad with its incompetence. Despite having virtually unlimited resources and spending months talking about the improvements that were supposedly on the way, the company simply wasn’t able to deliver them on schedule.
That’s essentially what happened with Apple Intelligence and Siri 2.0.
Back in 2024, Apple unveiled a vision of Siri that would finally understand personal context, interact intelligently with apps, and live up to its potential. The iPhone 16 Pro was marketed as being “Built for Apple Intelligence.” Not “Built for Some Apple Intelligence.” Not “Built for the First Version of Apple Intelligence.” Just Apple Intelligence. Full stop.
And nothing—for two years, there was complete silence!
Fast-forward two years.
The promised Siri upgrades have finally started to appear, courtesy of Apple’s own competitor by the way. Except now Apple has quietly attached a rather important asterisk—that you probably wouldn’t even have noticed if you didn’t pay attention.
Apparently, the most advanced Siri model and AI-features would only be available on the company’s “most capable iPhone, iPad and Mac systems.” Translation: if you bought an iPhone 16 Pro because Apple told you it was built for this AI future, congratulations—you’ve been kinda scammed.
Forget iPhone 16, that’s still history—even if you are the base model in the current lineup that is the 17-series, you don’t get all the perks. That’s just reserved for the big boys—the iPhone 17 Pro and the iPhone Air. Likewise, for the other devices, you’d need an iPad with an M4 chip or a later model (with 12GB of memory) or a Mac with an M3 chip or later model (with 12GB of memory) to be a part of the exclusive group.
As usual, brand loyalists will rush to defend the company by pointing out that there probably won’t be a lot of features missing, but they’ll be missing the whole point of this discussion. If your flagship devices can’t even last a full year before they’re unable to support the very technologies you’re introducing, then it’s hard to justify that. More importantly, the device that was built for Apple Intelligence is not able to handle the intelligence levels that you create just two years later, then why market it in such a way, in the first place. It raises a more fundamental question: what are customers actually paying a premium for?
What exactly are older iPhones missing out on?
Apple has explicitly confirmed that features such as expressive Siri voices and more advanced dictation require the newer AI model—reserved for devices like the iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone Air. That’s right: the phone that was sold as the flagship AI iPhone won’t get Apple’s best AI voice experience or its most advanced speech recognition capabilities.
And that’s just what Apple has admitted so far.
Mind you, the AI-model was something that they’d been struggling with since years. But now, all of a sudden, it seems like they’ve made it a little too advanced. Is this what they call suffering from success?
The bigger issue is that Apple hasn’t even properly provided a comprehensive list of feature restrictions. The wording used during the keynote strongly implied that Siri’s expressive voices and the advanced dictation features are merely examples of what the more powerful model enables, not the complete list.
Meaning that there may be more stuff that we don’t know about just yet. This saga of false promises will only unfold during the fall launch. So till then, hang tight folks!
