When Apple's take on the artificial intelligence craze sweeping the industry was announced, it was aptly called Apple Intelligence, in that it only runs on its most expensive iPhones at the moment.
The iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max Apple Intelligence exclusivity may not be here for long, though, as the iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Plus are also said to have 8GB RAM, the minimum for running Apple Intelligence. Moreover, they would likely be powered by Apple's upcoming A19 chipset series, and not fragmented by processor type like the iPhone 15 models.
For its 2025 model year, however, Apple may continue with the specs fragmentation trend of its iPhone series. As per a leaker who unearthed a timeline of the iPhone's development plans, the iPhone 17 Pro models will come with 12GB RAM for the first time in Apple's handset history.
Alleged Apple iPhone 17 series specs | Image credit – IceUniverse/Weibo)
This would most likely mean that Apple will leave the iPhone 17 with 8GB RAM, the bare minimum required to run Apple Intelligence features, and pacify its future owners with the installation of a long overdue LTPO display with 120Hz refresh rate.
According to famed Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, the specific Large Language Model (LLM) that Apple Intelligence runs on the iPhone or iPad devices themselves alone requires roughly 2GB of DDR RAM. The LLM chatbot-type services are artificial intelligence platforms written to recognize, interpret, and then generate text that looks like a natural conversation with the user.
Kuo said in a dedicated blog post on Medium that the on-device Apple Intelligence makes do with a 3 billion parameter LLM whose resource allocation after compression shared between 2-bit and 4-bit configurations can be shrunk to roughly 0.7-1.5GB of DRAM, but still this extra quantity of RAM "needs to be reserved at any time to run the Apple Intelligence on-device LLM."
For Kuo, the 11 TOPS (trillion operations per second) that the M1 chipset of Apple can run is the minimum for Apple Intelligence, but a working minimum, so any Apple A16 chipset and above will do the trick. "Microsoft believes the key specification for an AI PC is 40 TOPS of computing power. However, for Apple, integrated with cloud AI (Private Cloud Compute), 11 TOPS of on-device computing power is sufficient to start providing on-device AI applications," mentioned Kuo.
In the future, he is of the opinion that Apple will be aiming for an Apple Intelligence LLM with 7 billion parameters, and that will require at least another 2GB RAM on top of the current iPhone maximum, so it could serve as an additional Pro and non-Pro model fragmentation pretext.
iPhone 17 Pro and the triple 48MP camera
If you can run Apple Intelligence on 8GB RAM or 10GB RAM, why spend more for 12GB RAM chips, though? Well, in that same timeline, the 2025 iPhone 17 Pro models are listed as having not one or two, but three 48MP cameras, confirming previous speculation over Apple's camera upgrades.
If true, Apple will follow in the footsteps of mobile photography powerhouses like Oppo phones, which have been advocating for big camera sensors of the same resolution and quality across the zoom range. The latest Oppo Find X7 Ultra flagship, for example, has four 50MP cameras, including its two periscope zoom kits.
This sensor uniformity makes color balancing much easier and more uniform, and does wonders for HDR stacking and detail preservation all along the zoom range. The complex computational photography involved, however, needs more operating memory to function instantly and with the needed quality, so Apple may have had to introduce 12GB RAM to its iPhone for the first time for those exact same reasons.
Exciting times ahead, but we wouldn't hold our breath for the iPhone 17 to get folded optics zoom as well, that one will likely remain reserved for the Pro series for the foreseeable future.
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Daniel, a devoted tech writer at PhoneArena since 2010, has been engrossed in mobile technology since the Windows Mobile era. His expertise spans mobile hardware, software, and carrier networks, and he's keenly interested in the future of digital health, car connectivity, and 5G. Beyond his professional pursuits, Daniel finds balance in travel, reading, and exploring new tech innovations, while contemplating the ethical and privacy implications of our digital future.
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