iPhone 18/e debuts with 9GB of RAM: Unable to use two major new features in iOS 27
TF International Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo recently revealed that the iPhone 18/e, which Apple will launch in the first half of 2027, will be equipped with the A20 chip, and the RAM will be upgraded from 8GB in the current A19 models to 9GB.
Specifically, its hardware uses a combination of six 1.5GB DRAM chips, which adjusts the chip specifications and increases the total capacity compared to the previous generation’s configuration of four 2GB chips, in order to meet local AI computing needs.
It should be noted that iOS 27 sets a minimum operating standard of 12GB RAM for the two heavy-duty on-device AI models. The entire iPhone 18 Pro series is equipped with 12GB of RAM, which can fully unlock the relevant capabilities, while the 9GB iPhone 18/e cannot fully use the full range of features.
The two features that have been disabled are the highly customizable Siri voice and the significantly improved offline dictation: The new Siri allows users to freely adjust the tone, speed and timbre of their voice, greatly improving the naturalness of the interaction; the new dictation system optimizes sentence segmentation and polyphonic character recognition based on a local large model, significantly improving the accuracy of text-to-text conversion in offline scenarios, and can also recognize spoken tone and automatically mark punctuation.
These two functions require the device to have a large AI parameter file running continuously, and 9GB of memory cannot stably support the local model operation.
Of course, the standard iPhone 18 does not completely remove the entire Apple Intelligence suite. The added 1GB of memory is more than enough to meet the needs of regular AI text and image summarization, smart photo search, and smart email organization. It only lacks the two high-load voice AI features mentioned above.
Besides the memory requirement, the A20 base chip neural engine computing power of both models is also lower than that of the Pro series, further widening the gap in system functionality and user experience.
Industry analysts believe that Apple’s strategy of differentiating system features based on memory configuration is intended to create a clear difference between the base model and the high-end flagship, thereby encouraging users to choose the higher-end Pro models.
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