Morgan Stanley warns Apple’s revamped Siri could be limited by older iPhones

Apple’s latest attempt to overhaul Siri and bring more advanced AI to the iPhone is running into a basic hardware constraint, according to Morgan Stanley. In a note cited by news outlets, the bank argued that many older iPhones will be unable to run the most capable versions of Apple Intelligence, the set of on-device AI features that Apple is using to power Siri upgrades, writing tools, and other assistant-like functions.

The concern is scale. Morgan Stanley estimated that more than 850 million iPhones cannot handle basic Apple Intelligence queries, and that more than 1.3 billion iPhones cannot use the advanced Siri features. The figures underscore a familiar technology problem for smartphone AI: the best features often require newer chip architectures and larger memory footprints, so the “full experience” lands later and only on newer devices.

Morgan Stanley tied the bottleneck to the hardware needed to run AI locally, not in the cloud. The bank said customers need 12 GB of unified memory, a type of shared memory used by Apple devices to coordinate CPU, GPU, and other system components, to run the most advanced Siri features. It also pointed to the volume of on-device processing required for Apple Intelligence, which is part of Apple’s broader strategy to keep more AI workloads on the device for speed and privacy.

The Siri overhaul was presented as a centerpiece of Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference, where Apple highlighted an AI-centric direction aimed at narrowing the gap with competitors. The cited analysis frames the move as a response to rivals, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and Anthropic’s Claude, all of which have pushed more conversational and assistant-like capabilities into consumer software.

Morgan Stanley’s broader question is whether Apple can translate AI software capability into a sustained hardware upgrade cycle. “Selling hardware on the strength of software is challenging,” the bank cautioned, even as it expects AI accessibility to remain one of the leading drivers behind smartphone upgrades. In other words, if many users cannot access the newest AI features on their current devices, the marketing value rises. But if the upgrade benefit is narrower than expected, the financial impact could be muted.

For Apple, the timing matters because iPhone owners often keep devices longer than the typical cadence for new chip releases. Apple’s installed base, while a strength for distribution, can also dilute the reach of the newest on-device features. That makes the company’s AI rollout strategy closely tied to both developer adoption and the rate at which users replace older models with devices that meet the underlying technical requirements.

Even so, the company did not, in the cited reporting, spell out a per-model availability matrix for the Siri capabilities. Details such as which specific iPhone models qualify for the advanced Siri features, or how quickly Apple expects the Apple Intelligence experience to expand across tiers, were not included in the bank commentary as summarized.

As the market digests Apple’s WWDC AI announcements, attention is likely to focus on two things: which iPhones gain the higher-end Siri functions and how Apple Intelligence performs in real-world usage. Investors and observers will also watch whether Apple pairs the hardware requirement with compelling software benefits for users on older devices, since Morgan Stanley’s estimates imply many will remain locked out of the most advanced assistant experience for now.