“The iPhone 16 Hasn’t Even Been Announced Yet and There’s Already a Reason to Wait for the iPhone 17!”
Apple generally doesn’t disclose the amount of memory included in its new iPhones. But this latest rumor suggests that skipping the iPhone 16 and waiting for the iPhone 17 generation might be worth it if you’re envious of the memory setup. This year’s iPhones come with 12GB and 16GB among the entry-level and Pro models, respectively. It is rumored that Apple will follow suit with more RAM in next year’s iPhone release.
The speculation comes from Weibo, the Chinese social network where rumors abound. The post is from the “mobile phone chip expert” quoted by Apple blogs before. When translated into English, the post says:
“If you want to switch to an AI iPhone, maybe the 2025 iPhone 17 might be a good option. This year’s [iPhone 16] only has 8GB of memory, mainly for AI in the cloud. Next year’s [iPhone 17] will have 12GB of memory and more AI applications at the edge. For those who want to switch to an iPhone on a budget, of course, the rich locals don’t need to consider it.”
A thought-provoking statement
I’m not sure who the “rich locals” referenced in this post are, although everything else I read here makes sense. Google increased the memory in its flagship models this year because of a similar trend. It’s easy to believe that Apple would follow suit in this regard, as it’s about a year behind the rest of the industry in jumping on the AI train.
As mentioned, the annoying part is that Apple doesn’t immediately announce how much memory is inside its devices the way the Android world does. In fact, I don’t even find out until a teardown helps reveal it. The current iPhone has 8GB of RAM for high-resource processing, which is four less than what the base model Pixel 9 offers. Apple’s hardware operates differently, and since it owns everything it programs, it’s tuned for memory management a bit differently than Android phones.
Still, with Google bumping up its entire lineup by 4GB, Apple might consider doing the same, especially as it moves more of Apple Intelligence onto devices.
The ongoing development
Apple Intelligence is still a growing concept among users in the walled garden. None of the features are active yet, as they are expected to formally debut with the iPhone 16 release. Apple Intelligence isn’t even available in the public beta of iOS 18. We know Apple will take a hybrid approach to Apple Intelligence, where some processing is done on the device and the rest connects to the cloud. We also know Apple is heavily promoting the privacy and security of its Private Cloud Computing servers.
We’ll know more soon. Apple will announce the iPhone 16 on September 9 at its event.
This article has been translated from Gizmodo US by Lucas Handley. You can find the original version here.
