Now seems like a good time to buy a new iPhone. Apple has increased trade-in values over the coming weeks, and there are still plenty of spring carrier deals going on. Moreover, rumors of an iPhone 16 coming this fall make it sound like a relatively minor upgrade, while the iPhone 17 coming in late 2025 looks like a major overhaul (perhaps even a huge change in the style of the iPhone X).
But if you want our advice, I think you should still wait. WWDC is less than two weeks away, and it's almost certain to provide important information for your iPhone purchasing decision.
iOS 18 may change more than usual
Every year, when Apple unveils new iOS at WWDC, we learn about a ton of cool new features coming to iPhone in the fall. But if you read the fine print, you'll find that some of the cool new features don't work on older iPhones. For example, iOS 16 required a phone with an A12 Bionic processor or higher to use features like pulling out a subject in a photo, selecting text in an image, and most Siri functions handled locally.
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We expect there to be a lot of big changes in iOS 18, including interface improvements and some impressive new features, but the biggest focus will be on AI. Typically, all iPhones made in the past few years have all the new iOS features, with only the oldest phones missing them. But pushing for more AI could change everything. This is because AI features can have fairly steep hardware requirements. Apple is likely to limit some features to very new models, and the best features may only work on the iPhone 16.
And that's a big reason to wait to buy an iPhone until you know which iPhones the cool new AI features coming in iOS 18 will work on. You don't want to buy an iPhone 14 or SE only to find out that you need the A16 processor to get some really cool features.
AI hardware requirements are demanding.
Apple has been equipping iPhones with AI hardware for several years. The Neural Engine first appeared on the A11 Bionic chip in 2017 (iPhone 8 and iPhone X). Although it can only perform 600 billion operations per second and doesn't really do much. But over the years, it has become much more powerful and necessary.
In A12, we have made a huge leap forward to 5 trillion operations per second (TOPS). The next big jump was 11TOPS on the A14, 15TOPS on the A15, and now 35TOPS on the A17 Pro. However, the A17 Pro is only available on the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max. According to Apple, the iPhone 15 has A16 and the Neural Engine is only half as fast.
A17 Pro is only available on the iPhone 15 Pro model. This means that some AI features may not be available on phones less than one year old.
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Next is the RAM issue. Generative AI models, such as large language models (LLMs) and diffusion models, are very large and consume a lot of RAM. Most iPhones don't have a lot of RAM to begin with, and even with AI models, you'll need plenty of free space for your applications.
All iPhones supporting iOS 18 up to the iPhone 13 have only 4GB of RAM. iPhone 13 Pro, iPhone 14 (Regular and Pro), and iPhone 15 have 6GB of RAM. Only the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max have 8GB of RAM. So it's very likely that there will be some iOS 18 features that only work on iPhones with the faster Neural Engine or 6GB of RAM, while others may require the iPhone 15 Pro just because it has 8GB of RAM and even faster RAM. Neural Engine.
If you're looking for a new iPhone that will last you a few years, this is a big consideration. You might not want to spend hundreds of dollars more on the latest Pro model, but if you buy a cheaper model today, you'll likely miss out on some of the cool new AI features coming this fall.
So it's best to wait at least until WWDC on June 10th, when Apple unveils iOS 18 and all its new features. Then, take a closer look at the details that tell you which iPhone supports which features, so you can make an informed choice about how much you need to spend to get the features you want.