Apple is likely to add a swathe of AI features to its next iPhone series coming later this year.
This, it is said, will bring the iPhone 16 up to speed in comparison with rival handsets, such as the Samsung Galaxy S24.
We know that iOS 18, the operating system that'll launch alongside the iPhone 16, is expected to deliver a lot more AI-based features including a smarter Siri. And a new report suggests that if you want to get the best from those features, you're really going to want an iPhone 16.
That's because the 2024 iPhone will be getting a new generation of Apple silicon that's designed to deliver a serious AI upgrade.
The news comes via the sober Taiwanese news site the Economic Daily News (via MacRumors), which says that Apple is working on the next generation of its A series and M series mobile chipsets.
The A series is the one that powers the iPhone, while the M is for the top-end iPads and MacBook laptops. Both the A18 and the M4 will apparently feature an upgraded Neural Engine with "significantly" more processing cores to deliver much more efficient AI processing.
That's significant because while a lot of generative AI processing is carried out in the cloud, Apple would rather do it on your device – partly because of privacy, and partly because it then works offline.
What does the iPhone AI upgrade really mean?
For now Apple's plans for AI-assisted iOS features are still secret, but you can get a pretty good idea of what might be coming by imagining a Siri that isn't so limited and then taking a look at the AI features of the Samsung Galaxy S24.
The Galaxy AI features include Circle To Search for easier online lookups, Live Translate to deliver real-time translation, Chat Assist to help you write more effective social messages, and website summaries.
The big AI push, though, is in photography. In the Galaxy S24 you can manipulate the content of images using its Generative Edit feature, which delivers practical tools such as the ability to rotate an image and have AI fill in the border, or to shoot slo-mo at 120fps and get AI to smoothly and seamlessly transform it into 240fps.
Apple isn't saying anything just yet, but we can expect a big reveal at the WWDC developer's conference in June: that's when Apple will take the wraps off the next generation of iOS and iPadOS, with beta versions of the software going live shortly afterwards.
