With the arrival of iOS 18, Apple is preparing to integrate major innovations based on AI. However, these advances could lead to significant fragmentation on iPhones, iPads and Macs.
After Siri, Mark Gurman of Bloomberg gives us some interesting insights into the announcements expected at the next WWDC regarding iOS 18 and advances in artificial intelligence.
Apple plans to reinvent Siri, its virtual assistant. This development could, however, introduce significant fragmentation among Apple devices.
Siri, AI and local computing power
Fragmentation refers to the situation where an operating system has many versions in circulation, making it difficult for developers to create applications compatible with all devices and leading to security and performance issues.
With iOS 18, Apple is expected to add AI features that require significant local computing power, which could limit their accessibility to newer models like the iPhone 15 Pro.
Siri’s new capabilities, which will use a large language model (LLM) to directly control applications by voice, will require much more advanced hardware resources.
Simple AI tasks would be handled on the devices themselves, while more complex functions will be handled via the cloud.
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Challenges of technological fragmentation
The situation is not unique to Apple. For example, Copilot Plus PCs will be the only ones able to use Windows 11’s new Recall feature, showing a trend where new AI features require specific hardware components like neural processing units called NPUs. This requirement could create fragmentation comparable to that expected with iOS 18.
The same thing is happening at Samsung: the latest Galaxy S24s benefit from new Galaxy AI functions. These are only partially deployed on older devices.
We can imagine that the Galaxy S24, with its seven years of guaranteed software update support, will not offer all the new AI functions in the coming years. Indeed, AI integration often requires specific hardware components and high computing power. This situation creates a fragmentation comparable to that which we should observe at Apple.
Apple is a good student
Remember that Apple is one of the good students when it comes to supporting older devices with new versions of iOS. However, as Mark Gurman says, it seems clear that some new AI features will require an iPhone 15 Pro, and future iPhones, or M1 chips, in iPad Pros for example, to work, potentially leaving users behind. with older devices.
For Mark Gurman, this is clearly a way to encourage users to change their iPhone and iPad. This must be clearly seen at Apple: smartphones and tablets have increasingly long lifespans, with a decreasing renewal rate.
