[highwaylights]

Ironically, I feel like Apple might have lost me as a customer today. It won't matter to Apple, obviously, but so much of what they showed today I just felt was actively pushing me out of the ecosystem.

I first bought some devices for myself, then those devices got handed off to family when I upgraded, and now we're at a point where we still use all of the devices we bought to date - but the arbitrary obsolescence hammer came down fairly hard today with the intel cut-off and the iPhone 15+ requirement for the AI features. This isn't new for Apple, they've been aging perfectly usable devices out of support for years. We'll be fine for now, but patch support is only partial for devices on less-than-latest major releases so I likely need to replace a lot of stuff in the next couple of years and it would be way too expensive to do this whole thing again. I'll also really begrudge doing it, as the devices we have suit us just fine.

Some of it I can live without (most of the AI features they showed today), but for the parts that are sending off to the cloud anyway it just feels really hard to pretend it's anything other than trying to force upgrades people would be happy without. OCLP has done a good job for a couple of homework Macs, I might see about Windows licenses for those when they finally stop getting patches.

I'd feel worse for anyone that bought the Intel Mac Pro last year before it got taken off sale (although I'm not sure how many did). That's got to really feel like a kick in the teeth given the price of those things.

[hmottestad]

From rumours of Apple buying lots of GPUs from Nvidia not that long ago I think management got a nice little scare when OpenAI released GPT-3.5 and then GPT-4. It takes several years to bring a CPU to market. Apple probably realised far too late that they needed specific features in their SOCs to handle the new AI stuff, so it wasn’t included in anything before the A17 Pro. For the M1, M2 and M3 I believe that Apple is willing to sacrifice heat and battery to achieve what they want. The A17 Pro is probably very efficient at running LLMs so it can do so in a phone with a small battery and terrible thermal performance. For their Macs and iPads with M1, M2, M3 they will just run the LLMs on the AMX or the GPU cores and use more power and produce more heat.

Could also be a memory problem. The A17 Pro in the iPhone 15 Pro comes with 8 GB of memory while everything before that has 6 GB or less. All machines with the M1 or newer come with at least 8 GB of memory.

PS: The people who bought the Intel Mac Pro after the M1 was released knew very well what they were getting into.

[morvita]

It worth noting that the power of the neural engine doubled between the A16 and A17 chips (17 vs 35 TOPS, according to Wikipedia), while the A15 to A16 was a much more modest increase (15.8 to 17 TOPS). So it does seem like they started prioritizing AI/ML performance with the A17 design.

[jwr]

Apple started including the neural engine back with A11 Bionic. In 2017.

[talldayo]

And at .6 TOP/second of performance, that Neural Engine is practically useless today. You can go buy a $50 Rockchip board with an NPU 10x faster.

Which introduces a funny aspect, of the whole NPU/TPU thing. There's a constant stairstepping in capability; the newer models improving only obsoletes older ones faster. It's a bit of a design paradox.

[jwr]

Yes. But I was responding to "Apple probably realised far too late". I think they were in fact way ahead of everyone else, it's just that the hardware of 2017 can't keep up with the demands of today.

[hmottestad]

It was specifically the LLM stuff. Their neural engines were never designed for running LLMs. The question is if the new neural engine in the A17 Pro and M4 actually have the required features to run LLMs or not. That’s at least what I suspect.

[talldayo]

> I think they were in fact way ahead of everyone else,

This would be a lot easier to argue if they hadn't gimped their Neural Engine by only allowing it to run CoreML models. Nobody in the industry uses or cares about CoreML, even now. Back then, in 2017, it was still underpowered hardware that would obviously be outshined by a GPU compute shader.

I think Apple would be ahead of everyone else if they did the same thing Nvidia did by combining their Neural Engine and GPU, then tying it together with a composition layer. Instead they have a bunch of disconnected software and hardware libraries; you really can't blame anyone for trying to avoid iOS as an AI client.

[easyThrowaway]

I'm genuinely wondering why the NU was added in first place, I can't think of any app that made egregious use of that outside of the Gallery and Photo App. They didn't even allow any access from third parties in a few initial iterations.

[hmottestad]

On-device voice to text for Siri. Facial recognition in the photos app. Text recognition in photos. Scene recognition and adaptation in the camera app. And FaceID.

Not all those were available from day, except FaceID.

[Takennickname]

You have no idea what you're talking about. This is painful to read.

[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.

[themadturk]

It's odd...I've gotten along fine without AI in my iPhone 13, and it will continue to work just as I have come to expect with the new iOS.

The new AI features will be available on the iPad Air I just ordered, and on my M1 MacBook Air, and I'll be able to play with them there until I'm ready to upgrade my phone. I think these new features sound great, but I'm not in any hurry to adopt them wholesale.

[gumby]

> I think these new features sound great, but I'm not in any hurry to adopt them wholesale.

And if you don’t like them you don’t have to use them. I don’t use Siri and it doesn’t bother me that Apple includes it on all their machines.

[hansvm]

> I don't use Siri

That's likely true. Unless you were careful to do a lot more than just disabling it, it does use you though, slurping up quite a bit of data.

[whoiskevin]

reference? Proof? How is it slurping data if I have it turned off and don't even use it?

[hansvm]

You have to disable the data slurping for each app. The main toggle just governs whether it responds to voice commands. Previous discussion [0].

Separately, the data Siri sends isn't held to the same differential privacy standards as some of Apple's other diagnostics. They just give you a unique ID and yolo it [1]. Unless personalized device behaviors are somehow less identifiable than all the other classes of data subject to deanonymization attacks (demographics, software/hardware version fingerprints, ...), that unique ID is just to be able to pretend to the courts that they tried (give or take Hanlon's razor).

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39927657

[1] https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/data/en/ask-siri-dictati...

[flemhans]

How?

[hansvm]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40647751

[evantbyrne]

I'm not following. What business did they lose if you weren't planning to upgrade? Maybe there is a misunderstanding of what's being gated in the release. I have an iPhone 13, and it was not a surprise to see that AI upgrades would require new hardware. Maybe I'll get a 16 if reviews confirm that it's good.

[shrew]

iOS18 will still be available for older devices right? From the looks of the preview, it’ll go back to phones from 2018 which is fairly standard for Apple. And I’d imagine older iOS versions will continue to receive security updates for several years after they’re dropped from the latest version.

What is it about this release that has lost your support? Specifically gating the Apple Intelligence stuff to the most modern hardware?

[cchance]

I mean, your pushed out to what? Lol your acting like android doesn't obsolete the shit out of their past cycle phones. I don't really get what you wanted them to do here, they're deploying AI in the OS and ecosystem where they can and the features that the hardware supports are being brought in, i don't see where they're implementing features that the hardware supports and are blocking "because"... I don't think anywhere they clarified what part of the cloud tools wont work on older versions. But at the end of the day old hardware is old... its not gonna support everything especially on generational shifts like how much better arm was over intel, or the fact that NPU's don't just manifest inside of old silicon

[dwaite]

I'm confused. My understanding is that they didn't drop support for all Intel Macs in Sequoia. My 2018 MBP for example is still supported. The last Intel Mac Pro in your example is also still supported.

My MBP hasn't hasn't been _fully_ supported for many years. The M1-specific features started rolling out in 2021 - ability to run iPad apps being the most obvious one, the ability to get the globe view in maps being the most questionable. IIRC, my MBP did not yet have a M1 Pro/Max version available for sale when they announced the M1-specific features.

The point being, having AI features unavailable doesn't make the Mac unusable any more than it makes an iPhone 15 unusable. Those parts should continue to operate the way they do today (e.g. with today's Siri).

[graeme]

Apple isn’t magic and can’t defy physics. The chips on the older devices aren’t powerful enough to run the new features.

Hardware matters again now in a way it hasn’t for a couple of decades.

[umanwizard]

Requiring a new device for new features is not the same thing as removing support for older devices.

[iknowstuff]

What? Your phone does everything it did when you bought it and will keep receiving important updates for years to come. How entitled are you to expect to receive every upcoming feature? And where else are you gonna get that? Lol

[highwaylights]

Not sure this is accurate - a lot of devices have been culled from receiving future updates with these releases. This is not anything new this year, I get that, and I don't really mind not getting the new AI features, but having devices that will stop being supported and which can't have any other software installed because of being locked down is really not a fun situation to be on this side of.

The old Macs can still install Linux/Windows/ChromeOS Flex. iPads/iPhones not so much.

[tjmc]

It will be interesting to see if there's an Osborne Effect on iPhone 15 (non-pro) sales now that the model is effectively stuck with brain-dead Siri.