At WWDC in June Apple announced iOS 18 and, for the first time, drew a line through its own product range. The system itself installs on every iPhone back to the iPhone 11 and the second-generation iPhone SE — the same list as iOS 17. But the headline features are tiered by chip, and the newest tier is very small. Here is what each phone gets when the update ships in September.
iPhone 15 Pro and 15 Pro Max only
Apple Intelligence — the writing tools that draft and rewrite text, the notification summaries, the image generator, the Siri that understands context and acts inside apps — requires the A17 Pro chip and 8 GB of memory, which means the two Pro models from last year and nothing older. The same goes for ChatGPT in Siri, the arrangement under which Siri hands hard questions to OpenAI with your permission. The iPhone 15 and 15 Plus, sold at the same time, are excluded; they have 6 GB.
iPhone 12 and later
Three notable features need the A14 chip or newer. Live audio transcription in Notes writes a transcript as you record, or from an existing recording. Eye tracking, borrowed from the Vision Pro, lets you control the phone with your gaze using the front camera — an accessibility feature, and a remarkable one. Music Haptics plays songs through the phone’s vibration motor for deaf and hard-of-hearing listeners.
iPhone 11 and later
Everything else. Hands-free door unlocking in the Home app, for smart locks; Enhanced Dialogue, which lifts speech over background sound in video; and the whole of iOS 18’s visible redesign — the customisable home screen with icons anywhere, the colour-tinted icons, the redesigned Control Center, the Passwords app, RCS messaging with Android, and the Photos overhaul. That is most of the update, and it runs on a five-year-old phone.
What it means in Bangladesh
The iPhone 15 Pro is a 190,000-taka phone here, and most of the country’s iPhones are 11s, 12s and 13s bought new or refurbished. For them, iOS 18 is a good update — the home screen, RCS and Photos alone justify it — but Apple Intelligence is not coming, and there is no setting or workaround that changes that. Nor is Bangla: Apple Intelligence launches in US English only, and its language list for 2025 does not include Bangla. The practical advice is to take the update in September for what it gives the phone you have, and not to buy a 15 Pro for AI features that will not speak your language for a while yet.
Source: 9to5Mac, via Prothom Alo.
