Apple Is Craftily Using Siri AI To Push You Towards iPhone 18 Pro Duo And Away From The Low-Margin Base iPhone 18
Publish Date: 2026-06-10 09:49:00
Source Domain: wccftech.com
Apple has deliberately, and quite craftily so, shaped a paradigm where Siri AI’s most powerful features will only be available on the Pro iPhones from now onward, which only serves to add another demand-related tailwind to the upcoming iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max, while subduing the expected uptake of the low-margin and high-volume base iPhone 18 variant.
Siri AI’s premier functionalities now require a double-digit RAM, which should skew Apple’s upcoming sales mix to favor the iPhone 18 Pro models
As we detailed in a dedicated post, the all-new Siri AI and Apple Intelligence is powered by 3 cloud-based models, with the AFM 3 Cloud Pro reportedly distilled from a 1.2-trillion-parameter Google Gemini model, and two on-device models, called AFM 3 Core Advanced and AFM 3 Core, respectively.
5 new Apple Foundation Models:
AFM 3 Core: 3B parameter on-device model, similar to the one we had before but smarter.
AFM 3 Core Advanced: 20B parameter on-device model for iPhone 17 Pro/Air, iPad Pro M4 (12GB RAM) and M3 Macs (12GB RAM). Custom-designed by Apple using an…
— AppleLeaker (@LeakerApple) June 10, 2026
While the AFM 3 Core has just 3 billion parameters, the AFM 3 Core Advanced takes the parameter count to 20 billion, but only activates between 1 and 4 billion parameters at a time, depending on the task at hand. Critically, it is this model that unlocks a revamped dictation function and more expressive Siri AI voices.
At a granular level, Apple’s AFM 3 Core Advanced sports an innovative architecture, where model attention blocks – which look at the broader meaning within a given prompt – reside in the DRAM, while Feed-Forward Network (FFN) weights – which explore each prompt string or word individually to surface its specific meaning within the given context – reside in the NAND.
Even though Apple’s AFM 3 Core Advanced model only loads between 1 and 4 billion parameters into the DRAM at any given time, it still…
