Comment on Apple reminding me my iPad sucks
CompactFlax@discuss.tchncs.de 3 days ago
I very much understand why the software hits end of support but goddamn it’s irritating when something this simple is gated.
Going back to Siri on iPhone 4 (only 4S supported it despite no hardware limitation) and perhaps earlier, Apple gates features behind hardware upgrades for no reason beyond selling new hardware (eg Apple AI on iPhone 15 Pro, not plus, but it’s all in the cloud anyways). This makes it difficult to have a reasonable conversation about legitimately EOL devices - an iPad that’s EOL doesn’t get the feature for med notification because it’s packaged with the other OS changes and the amount of work to backport it to an older OS version is significant.
We used to get support for 5-9 years… the company is still unimaginably wealthy, but the fucking accountant-in-chief decided that he needed a few more Ferraris.
Tim Cook can eat a dick… (Or maybe that should’ve been pussy? I don’t want him to enjoy it.) 😅
TheRealKuni@piefed.social 3 days ago
It isn’t, though. Apple does a significant amount of their AI processing locally. It’s part of why they’re “behind” the competition, but I actually see it as a plus due to the privacy advantages.
(When they do go to the cloud, that is, when the on-board models are insufficient, first it goes to Apple’s servers, where the request is reportedly handled without any tracking or logging. If Apple’s AI isn’t good enough, it will ask if it can send the request to ChatGPT, and then even that connection goes through Apple instead of through your account so tracking is minimized.)
Apple cares about privacy, or at least cares about appearing to care about privacy. They’re obviously not at the level of GrapheneOS or something, but for a mainstream retail phone company, they’re better than most in this regard.
CompactFlax@discuss.tchncs.de 3 days ago
From recollection, the chip in the iPhone 15 had the capacity to do the local model and perhaps they turned it on in an iPad. Or perhaps I’m confused. That happens a lot.
noahimesaka1873@lemmy.funami.tech 3 days ago
Because it’s about RAM. It requires 8GB of RAM which iPhone 15 doesn’t. (But 15 Pro does.)
CompactFlax@discuss.tchncs.de 3 days ago
Ah, true.
TheRealKuni@piefed.social 3 days ago
The iPads with AI support are the Pro ones with M processors, same series that the MacBooks use. (Believe it or not, iPad actually got the M4 before the MacBooks did.) Unless they’ve enabled it in the newest iPads running A series processors, which may have the AI cores that the iPhone 15 Pro and later have. I don’t know, I haven’t followed any iPad news in a while. My iPad Pro is mostly an extremely overpowered sheet music device that I occasionally use for productive tasks or Moonlight/Xbox/video streaming. 😅