Apple’s new M5 chip is impressive, but raises some questions about contextual Siri.

I’m a bit behind with the news and with my thoughts on all things Apple, but I think the new M5 chip and future Pro and Max chips will be a cut off point for AI features. The marketing for this chip and its AI capabilities are beyond anything else Apple has ever released:

Just a teaser from their full Newsroom article:

A Next-Generation GPU Architecture Optimized for AI and Graphics

With the next-generation GPU architecture in M5, every compute block of the chip is optimized for AI. The 10-core GPU features a dedicated Neural Accelerator in each core, delivering over 4x peak GPU compute compared to M4, and over 6x peak GPU compute for AI performance compared to M1.1 And now with M5, the new 14-inch MacBook Pro and iPad Pro benefit from dramatically accelerated processing for AI-driven workflows, such as running diffusion models in apps like Draw Things, or running large language models locally using platforms like webAI.

Apple is still working on the new contextual version of Siri that allegedly can pull information from multiple apps to give you a proper answer to the hallmark question - “When is Mom’s flight landing,” and I think older hardware that was promised this feature will have significantly reduced performance.

The Catch-22 is, Apple has always been about top-notch performance and would axe features on older devices if they performed poorly, so that begs the question (or questions):

Will the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 16 line of devices even get contextual Siri? Will it have the hardware guts to truly support it without feeling slow and broken? Which Macs will receive the new contextual Siri? Surely an M1 with 8GB of RAM can’t spit out contextual Siri’s answers fast enough to satisfy Apple and even consumers?

Currently, only iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone Air have 12 GB of RAM, and all iPhone 16 devices and the 15 Pro devices have 8GB of RAM. Next year’s iPhone 18 lineup is rumored to have 12GB of RAM across the lineup to fully support what I would call “Apple Intelligence 2.0” (via MacRumors):

With its latest iPhone lineup, the iPhone Air, iPhone 17 Pro, and ‌iPhone 17 Pro‌ Max feature 12GB of memory. This is a significant increase of 4GB more their predecessors, largely driven by the demands of on-device artificial intelligence processing.

The iPhone 17 is the only new model to continue to feature 8GB of memory. It looks like that will change with the ‌iPhone 18‌, with Apple reportedly seeking memory parity across all four models.

At this point we won’t get contextual Siri until WWDC 2026, which means it will release with iOS 27 in September 2026 along with the new iPhone 18 lineup.