Only These iPhone Models Will Get the New Siri AI This Fall
Apple's WWDC 2026 unveiled a revamped Siri, but it will only be available on devices supporting Apple Intelligence, starting with the iPhone 15 Pro series.
Apple has finally announced a major upgrade to Siri at WWDC 2026, delivering on long-standing promises of a smarter virtual assistant. However, the new Siri AI will not be available on all iPhones—only devices compatible with Apple Intelligence will receive the update come this fall.
Compatible iPhones include every model released since the iPhone 15 Pro, as well as iPads and Macs with Apple silicon. The 2024 iPad mini also makes the cut because it uses the same system-on-chip as the iPhone 15 Pro. Users can check eligibility by going to Settings and looking for the “Apple Intelligence & Siri” section.
The new assistant will initially launch as a beta, likely requiring users to opt in manually, similar to those on the iOS 27 developer beta. Fortunately, iOS 27 itself supports devices as old as the iPhone 11. Siri AI can handle personal requests with context awareness, drawing information from notes, messages, emails, and photos.
It runs on new Apple Foundation Models stored on-device for speed and privacy. Complex queries are offloaded to the cloud via Private Cloud Compute, which Apple claims keeps data inaccessible to others. The iPhone 17 Pro, 17 Pro Max, and iPhone Air will have an even more powerful on-device model, enabling expressive voices, better speech recognition, and more accurate dictation.
The upcoming iPhone 18 Pro and the rumored iPhone Fold will also feature this powerful model, though it’s unclear if the base iPhone 18 will. Analyst Ming-Chi Kuo reports Apple may increase memory in non-Pro iPhones to 9GB, but its most powerful on-device AI models require at least 12GB of RAM. While many Apple Intelligence features have felt gimmicky, early beta tests of Siri AI show it to be fast and genuinely useful.
