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Comment by larusso | Hacker News Reader

I don‘t get what they really complain about here? I mean first it’s Apple. They didn’t introduce a new paid service but a service which will be free to iPhone users this fall. And I strongly assume it will be iPhone 15Pro, iPhone16 and iPhone 16Pro by that time. So people can either upgrade to an older pro model or get the newest hottest device.

Second: When VW produces a new car nobody complains that the million drivers won’t get an update automatically. And even if we would say VW introduces a new AI parking system or whatever would it mean everybody would get it. I think the server side solution could work on older devices but that is rarely what Apple does. Also they specifically split the whole AI presentation from all the others features coming to iOS, macOS etc. not like millions of users won’t get anything with the next update.

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There's always something to complain about. If the AI runs on servers then oh no there's no privacy. If it runs locally then oh no it won't run on my old hardware.

Given Apple's general emphasis on privacy and selling hardware, this seems like the right path for them. Personally I'm all for it.

But it's going to run on servers anyways, both Apple's and OpenAI's.

The Apple server worlkoads are anonymized: https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/

It makes perfect sense to me that Apple would gatekeep which devices are allowed to offload the AI workload to their private cloud. Older devices would need to offload pretty much 100% of the AI workload to the cloud because those old devices don't have enough power. That's expensive.

Apple is not charging the user for this. The user has to pay for it with their device purchase.

OpenAI servers will be used only when specifically instructed by the user, never automatically.

To some extent, but they keep it local as much as they can.

https://www.theverge.com/2024/6/13/24175985/apple-intelligen...

It's purely about compute power[0]. The A17 Pro has 35 TOPS of Neural Engine performance, A16 Bionic has 17. A15 has 15.8.

The M-series have less performance, but I think they're compensated by being in iPads where they can use more power (battery) without impacting people's lives too much.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A17

It’s about RAM, I think. Only A17 Pro has 8GB, which we can infer is the new baseline.

It's only 2GB more than the A16, and Apple's models are "SLM"s by their own terminology.

But it might be significant too. Still it's not an arbitrary limitation, but an actual lack of processing power on the older devices.

Yes, 25% more RAM is significant. As you said, the M1 has significantly less performance, but it has enough memory. We can infer that RAM is the deciding factor from that.

>When VW produces a new car nobody complains that the million drivers won’t get an update automatically.

Terrible comparison because

1, Car makers doesn’t release new cars every single year

2, For most people a car is the 2nd biggest investment after their house which is nowhere near a smartphone in cost (that most people get subsidized by their carrier)

> 1. Car makers doesn’t release new cars every single year

They do. The 4 numbers that typically start with 20 or sometimes 19 indicate the model year of a vehicle which does change periodically.

> smartphone in cost (that most people get subsidized by their carrier)

In almost all cases, this is nothing but an intransparent form of installment payments, coupled with a carrier lock-in that helps keep prices high (because most people or even families can only switch ever other year or so).

Maybe it’s still very common in the US, but many people have moved on from this.

I think the last time I bought a phone via a carrier plan was about 2007.

It’s about the fact that the current install base (which also goes into the millions) won‘t get stuff for free.

If Apple is doing it for pushing sales (Mac users with an m1 will get it without hardware upgrades and these devices are over 3 years old by the time of release) is anybodies guess.

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