Amount of iPhone storage needed for Apple Intelligence nearly doubles

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Four iPhone units running Apple Intelligence flank a middle unit showing the Always On display.
Galaxy AI's Live Translate is arguably the most useful AI tool I've seen offered on a phone. With this feature, two people speaking different languages can have a constructive phone conversation that is translated in real-time so that both parties to the call can perfectly understand the other person. Can you think of any Apple Intelligence feature that is as useful? Genmoji might be useful to some, but not in the same way. Apple does have some catching up to do on the AI front.

At this point, the only AI feature I use every day on my iPhone 15 Pro Max is the ChatGPT integration with Siri. Eventually I'd expect Apple to come up with more AI features for Apple Intelligence and hopefully some of these will be as useful as Live Translate. Speaking of Apple Intelligence, before iOS 18.2 was released disseminating the second batch of Apple Intelligence on compatible iPhone handsets, Apple said that Apple Intelligence takes up 4GB of the storage on your iPhone. But that has changed.


With iOS 18.2 Apple released the Image Playground, Genmoji, ChatGPT integration with Siri, and more. Now, Apple Intelligence takes up 7GB of the storage on a compatible iPhone. If your iPhone 15 Pro, iPhone 16, iPhone 16 Plus, and iPhone 16 Pro have only 128GB of storage, Apple Intelligence went from taking up 3% of the storage on your device to 5.5% in a heartbeat. By the way, the minimum amount of storage on the iPhone 15 Pro Max and iPhone 16 Pro Max is 256GB giving you a little more space and allowing you not to think twice about how much storage AI is taking on your iPhone if you have one of those models.

Apple Intelligence will probably continue to eat up more storage as time goes on which means that eventually more models-not just the iPhone Pro Max-will start with 256GB of storage. Because of the minimum 8GB of RAM needed for an iPhone to run Apple Intelligence, Apple already made sure that certain models such as the iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Plus are equipped with 8GB RAM. After all, the iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Plus, neither of which support Apple Intelligence, came with only 6GB of RAM. The iPhone SE 4 is also expected to include 8GB of RAM so it can support Apple Intelligence.

While Apple Intelligence can be disabled, it's like Pandora's Box. Once you install it on your phone, you might not be able to get back all of the storage your iPhone committed to AI even if you disable Apple Intelligence.
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