Apple iPhone 17 can’t handle these two major Siri AI features
The standard iPhone 17 model only has 8GB of RAM. The full Siri AI feature suite requires 12GB.
The new Siri AI features unveiled by Apple at WWDC will not be fully supported by the standard iPhone 17 models, which was released less than a year ago.
Two of the key Siri AI features revealed during Monday’s keynotes address have a system requirement of 12GB of RAM, Apple confirmed. That means only the iPhone 17 Pro, iPhone 17 Pro Max and iPhone Air models from 2025 can handle the load.
The standard iPhone 17 only has 8GB of RAM. No model released before that, Pro or otherwise, has more. The two features in question are surprising as, in theory, they don’t sound all that labour intensive. They are:
- The more expressive Siri voices that are designed to help interactions with the assistant feel more natural and conversational.
- The big boost to on-board dictation across the system.
In the case of the latter, the additional computing power is leveraged to enable our waffled speech to be expressed on screen as polished prose, complete with punctuation and formatting. 8GB of RAM seemingly isn’t enough to cut it anymore, and this is the first time Apple has raised the threshold so high for Apple Intelligence features.
Beyond those two, Apple is confident all of the other features will work perfectly well on a device with 8GB of available RAM. Those include the new standalone chatbot app, the awareness of personal context pulling from other stock apps within the system, the enhancements to Writing Tools, the presence of Siri as part of the Camera app, the on-screen awareness, and plenty more.
Not receiving the new voices might be a little bit of a bummer, but if you don’t currently use the dictation feature, you probably will not miss the updated one either.
It does feel a bit odd announcing a new feature that part of the newest iPhone generation is unable to handle. It’s likely Apple agonised over this, but decided the experience drop-off wasn’t worth it. It may have determined the likely audience for both of these features would largely be owners of the Pro devices anyway.
Chris Smith
