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> why older devices can't use private cloud compute thats 100% off device is just apple being anti-consumer.

I don't know if it's "anti-consumer" to NOT roll out free cloud LLM usage to everyone. The idea with only giving it to the devices with on-device AI capabilities is that ideally most of the tasks will cost Apple nothing because it will run on-device, and anything more complicated will start costing them tokens.

If they gave it to devices without on-device models, ALL Siri requests from people with older iPhones will suddenly be burning money.

Not to mention, if we assume responses from the cloud are better than the local model, then the older iPhones get an overall better experience than the newer ones.

The design is that there is always a local model capable of forming a remote query with just the subset of local data on your phone needed to answer that query.

They may have decided that local processing was a MVP feature either for faster responsiveness or to reduce cloud cost. It may have been additional memory pressure or a limitation in processing on the previous A-series chip. Or they may have simply decided it wasn't worth creating and validating Yet Another model.

They would have to build the product twice one for mobile chips and one for server, and then there would be functionality discrepancies. Or even worse, the on server one might work better than the on device one that newer phone users get.

If you want hosted AI you can already install the Gemini app or whatever. The only advantage Apple can offer is something that runs on device.

While I generally agree with your sentiment, imaging how they would say it to users: your ai works on iPhone 15 pro but some things will work if it’s a little less private we send things to a server then the regular 15 can do it. Image generation is server based so 15 is ok, but editing an image is not since 15 does not have enough ram but 15 pro does. Etc etc.

Or just say: ai for 15 pro not for 15.