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.
Why the line falls where it does
Apple rarely explains a cutoff, and this one looked arbitrary: the iPhone 15, released nine months earlier, was excluded while the 15 Pro was not. The reason reported consistently is memory.
A model that runs on the phone has to be loaded into RAM and stay there, alongside the app you are using. Apple’s on-device model needs a few gigabytes resident, and the iPhone 15 Pro has 8GB where the iPhone 15 has 6GB. The Neural Engine in the A17 Pro is also faster, but memory is the hard wall: a model that does not fit does not run slowly, it does not run.
This is worth knowing because it predicts the pattern rather than just explaining one cutoff. On-device AI makes RAM the number that determines how long a phone stays current — which it has not been for a decade — and that applies to Android phones in this market just as much. When buying now, the memory figure is the one that will decide what the phone can do in 2027.
Source: 9to5Mac, via Prothom Alo.
