Apple has pulled a Tesla here. FSD on HW3 cars is stuck on old software with no upgrade path as of now. Tesla is potentially justifying it by calling it "FSD (Supervised)" so they don't have to do an expensive retrofit to them even though they sold these cars originally with the promise of fully autonomous driving.

All the iPhone 16/Pro owners have been waiting for Apple Intelligence features announced from that WWDC 2 years ago. They didn't get delivered and now won't ever be delivered with on-device intelligence due to the 8GB RAM limitation.

I’ve got a 2023 Mac Studio M2, and was dismayed by the M3 & later. So I’ve been trying to track down more details. That specific device list is only for:

> Apple’s most powerful on-device model and the features it enables, like expressive voices and more advanced dictation, […]

On other devices, I think there’s still on device support (just not with the “most powerful model”), for these devices:

> 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, iPad mini (A17 Pro), MacBook Neo (A18 Pro), iPad models with M1 or later, Mac with M1 or later, Apple Vision Pro, Apple Watch Series 9 or later, Apple Watch Ultra 2 or later, and Apple Watch SE 3 when paired with an Apple Intelligence-enabled iPhone nearby.

This is from the footnotes on https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/06/apple-introduces-siri...

I do wish they’d been more clear about what the “advanced features” are :(

That's specifically the secondary, more-powerful model. It was only mentioned in passing in the keynote, but on this page anyway, it seems to be just the improved dictation in Siri and ability to customize pacing, etc.

I'm glad I've been sitting on my iPhone 15 Pro Max... I'll upgrade someday, if/when I need to and the software updates are compelling, but I'll see how things run on my M5 Macbook. But the 15 Pro Max isn't subpar in any other way.

The 12gb number is weird, but also telling.

iPhones have 12gb, current Neo has 8gb, the next gen Neo is speculated to have 12gb (as it'll be based on a later iPhone chip).

> It’s really disappointing to see the on-device models being limited to so few devices.

At first I thought it was the usual planned obsolescence. Then I realized it may be a true technical limitation. I suspect an embedding model is required to run on device in order to make several of the features work. Embedding models are small compared to LLMs, but, depending on their capabilities, could be the memory driver.