iPhone 17 Excluded from the Most Advanced AI Features of iOS 27: Here’s Why
Apple has once again drawn a clear line regarding the hardware requirements for its most advanced artificial intelligence features, excluding the base model iPhone 17 from some of the significant updates introduced with iOS 27. This decision mirrors the scenario observed in 2024 with the iPhone 15, where the more accessible variants did not receive full support for Apple Intelligence due to technical specifications deemed insufficient.
The issue lies with RAM, as explained in a recent article by 9To5Mac: the iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone Air models boast 12GB of memory, while the standard iPhone 17 is limited to 8GB. This latter figure is precisely what has been the threshold for the most demanding AI functionalities. Due to this disparity, two of the main AI innovations in iOS 27 will not be available on the iPhone 17:
- the most powerful on-device AI model
- the new voice customization feature for Siri AI.
12GB of RAM Required for the Most Advanced AI Features of iOS 27
Apple has reaffirmed this requirement by extending the 12GB RAM threshold to the new iPads with M4 and later chips, and to Macs with M3 processors and above. Without that minimum amount, those functionalities will not be enabled on the device in use.
iOS 27 still introduces various advanced features, such as a substantial update for Visual Intelligence, while the “Smart Suggestions” offer contextual actions: if you frame a plant, Siri will suggest identifying it; for a dish of food, it may provide nutritional information. The integration of Visual Intelligence with Siri AI is now so deep that it will no longer be necessary to delegate more complex questions to ChatGPT, as the enhanced version of Siri can retrieve information from the web autonomously.
The new features include “Nutritional Insights” to evaluate the nutritional value of meals, “Bill Splitting” (available only in the USA) to split restaurant bills via Apple Cash, and even the Photos app has received significant updates. New editing tools based on artificial intelligence, such as “Extend” and “Reframe,” allow users to dynamically expand or reposition the framing of an image, while the “Clean Up” function has been improved to remove distractions with greater realism.
Beyond the major AI innovations, iOS 27 introduces several small but significant improvements that enhance the user experience even on older iPhones. Among these is the function to save a single frame from a video as a photo, the customizations of the lock screen now allowing for a more compact clock and neater widgets, as well as the convenient option to close media playback controls with a swipe. We have already covered the new features of iOS 27 in our dedicated in-depth article.