Apple's most advanced iOS 27 AI features won't run on anything older than the iPhone 17 Pro.
At WWDC, SVP Craig Federighi confirmed that two new capabilities, expressive Siri voices and a rebuilt dictation engine, require the silicon inside the iPhone 17 Pro, iPhone 17 Pro Max, or iPhone Air. On iPad, the cutoff is M4 or later with at least 12GB of unified memory; on Mac, M3 or later with the same memory floor; on Apple Vision Pro, M5. Devices below those thresholds, including the iPhone 16 Pro Max, get the rebuilt Siri app, Visual Intelligence, and writing tools, but not the voice customization or the dictation overhaul.
The cutoff lands one generation below Apple's newest hardware, meaning iPhone 16 Pro Max owners who upgraded last fall won't get the full iOS 27 AI experience. Apple has run this playbook before: Apple Intelligence debuted in iOS 18 requiring an A17 Pro chip or better, which excluded the entire iPhone 15 line except the Pro models. Supporting iOS 27 back to the iPhone 11 makes for a generous headline number, but the actual feature gap between tiers is widening.
Separately, Siri AI will arrive only as a public beta this fall and won't be available in the EU or China at launch, so even the favored hardware tier may be waiting awhile.