[methodical]

While I mostly agree with your point of Apple being rather aggressive with forced upgrading, I don't think the device requirements for these features were based solely on the desire to push out people with older devices, but rather due to the hardware requirements for a lot of the ML/AI features being based on the Apple Silicon, at least for the Mac side of things. As to why they drew the line at the iPhone 15, perhaps it's a similar reason regarding performance requirements. While obviously, I'm not intimately knowledgeable of their basis for the device requirements, I'd wait a few more years to see how the device requirements for these new features cascade. If they continue requiring newer and newer devices, only supporting the trailing generation or so, then I'd agree wholeheartedly with your sentiment.

[guhcampos]

I'm with you here. As a proud owner of an iPhone 13 Mini, I refuse to switch to anything bigger than that, but I do concede that any moderately useful AI pipeline will require more power than my aging phone is capable to provide.

[dwaite]

I'll always slightly regret not getting a Mini, but 2020 was a really bad year for it to launch (when I didn't feel like the extra work needed to see one in person) and 2021 I actually needed a better camera.

In retrospect though, it may be best that I don't know what I missed.

[Aperocky]

It'll get you when the battery life drops to 4 hours screen time.

[jomohke]

Yes, it's not arbitrary at all — they're only offering it on devices with at least 8GB of memory.

The iPhone 15 Pros were the first iPhones with 8GB. All M1+ Macs/iPads have at least 8GB of ram.

LLMs are very memory hungry, so frankly I'm a little surprised they support such low memory requirements (especially knowing that the system is running other tasks, not just ML). Microsoft's Copilot+ program has a 16GB minimum.