Apple will announce the iPhone 16 series on September 9, and a new rumor claims that all four models will feature 8GB of RAM. In contrast, the iPhone 17 family, which will be released next year, will upgrade to 12GB of RAM.
This is a pretty significant jump and it all seems to be AI-related – this time around, Apple Intelligence features will be mostly cloud-based, but once the iPhone 17 models launch, a lot more AI will be on-device, hence the need for more RAM.
Google has already increased the RAM of its devices with the Pixel 9 family launched earlier this month, and even uses some of the RAM only for AI apps and nothing else.
While Apple has traditionally equipped its iPhones with far less RAM than its Android competitors, that looks set to change in 2025 thanks to AI. If this rumor is true, that is.
Source (in Chinese)