> why older devices can't use private cloud compute thats 100% off device is just apple being anti-consumer.

I don't know if it's "anti-consumer" to NOT roll out free cloud LLM usage to everyone. The idea with only giving it to the devices with on-device AI capabilities is that ideally most of the tasks will cost Apple nothing because it will run on-device, and anything more complicated will start costing them tokens.

If they gave it to devices without on-device models, ALL Siri requests from people with older iPhones will suddenly be burning money.

Not to mention, if we assume responses from the cloud are better than the local model, then the older iPhones get an overall better experience than the newer ones.