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Apple announced the upcoming iOS 27 update at its Worldwide Developers Conference on Monday. While the company announced that the next iOS version will be compatible with devices reaching back to the iPhone 11, the move feels underwhelming for people with older devices, thanks to one wrinkle.
WWDC was focused on the integration of AI into Apple’s digital assistant Siri. The company spent about 25 minutes on platform improvements and privacy combined, then almost double that on Siri and Apple Intelligence. And while Apple said the digital assistant can help you in more areas on your iPhone, it didn’t expand on which iPhones can use AI features.
Apple Intelligence still only works with the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max and all newer iPhones. And according to Apple, some of the AI features in iOS 27 are only available on iPhones with 12GB of unified memory, like the iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max and iPhone Air. So if you have an iPhone 11 — or an iPhone 14 Pro as I do — and were happy to hear your device could run iOS 27, most of the announced features from WWDC won’t come to your phone.
And that’s the issue. Yes, compatibility with older devices is a good thing because not everyone can upgrade to the latest iPhone every year or two, and supporting older phones can help protect those devices from exploits. But at the same time, Apple’s extreme focus on AI features feels like it leaves those older phone owners in the past.
After WWDC, I downloaded the iOS 27 developer beta onto my old iPhone 14 Pro and was almost immediately disappointed. Because my device doesn’t support Apple Intelligence, nothing changed meaningfully on my device. I found the new Liquid Glass slider, but after that, I didn’t know what else to do with the update.
I guess a few of the app icons, like Maps, look a little different if you squint, but the update didn’t bring anything to my iPhone 14 Pro for me to get excited about. If someone secretly updated my device without me knowing, I probably wouldn’t have noticed.
Even when Apple releases iOS 27 this fall, if I don’t want to use the new Siri AI features on my iPhone 16 Pro because I don’t find it helpful or I have ethical concerns about AI usage, what is there to get excited about? Smoother network transitions? More child safety features? These are welcome improvements, but they’re not the big new features I’ve come to expect from major iOS upgrades.
“We believe the best operating systems aren’t just built on big breakthroughs, they’re built on sweating the details,” said Apple’s Craig Federighi, senior vice president of software engineering, toward the start of the presentation. That’s fine, but it seems like the company didn’t sweat much over the details of who can actually use the features it spent most of the presentation talking about.
With Apple’s focus on AI at WWDC, the company seems to be ignoring people who don’t have access to these features or don’t want to use them. We’ve seen Google do this exact thing for a few years now with its annual Google I/O presentation. The shows focus on AI yet fail to present anything revolutionarily helpful, and everything else gets put on the back burner.
If Apple wants to bring more utility to more people and iPhones, introduce a clipboard to iOS for all your copy-and-paste needs, bring split-screen capabilities to the iPhone, or just fix some of the persistent bugs. Those things don’t require AI and could be rolled out to more people.
The more the company focuses on AI, the less compatibility with older devices matters. While iOS 26 was divisive thanks to its Liquid Glass design, at least it delivered something significant to everyone.
For more Apple news, here’s everything the company announced at WWDC and what to know about iOS 27.
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