Apple’s AI Siri Will Be Held Back By Aging Devices, Says Morgan Stanley
Apple’s newly introduced AI Siri will have limited use across much of the company’s install base because older iPhones lack the capabilities to run advanced AI features, Morgan Stanley said in a research note on Tuesday.
More than 850 million iPhones won’t be able to run basic Apple Intelligence queries and more than 1.3 billion won’t be able to use advanced Siri features, the brokerage said.
The long-delayed Siri overhaul was the centerpiece of Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference on Monday, with the world’s most valuable smartphone maker betting on the feature to keep up with rivals like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and Anthropic’s Claude.
Morgan Stanley warned that although AI accessibility is among the leading drivers of smartphone upgrades, it is difficult to sell hardware on the power of software.
The bottleneck for upgraded Siri and AI tools comes from chip architecture and memory. The brokerage said users need 12GB of unified memory to run the most advanced Siri features due to the on-device processing volume required by Apple Intelligence.
