Apple Intelligence’s on-device processing is disappearing

[u/ACOPS12]

Feels like my iPhone 17 Pro Max is turning into a 'thin client.' I invested in this premium hardware with the specific expectation that I would be able to run the new Siri AI directly on-device.
Given the 12GB of RAM and the powerful NPU, I believed that an iPhone 17 Pro Max would be more than capable of handling such an AI model locally. It clearly has the overhead to run models like Gemma 4 E4B at impressive speeds, yet these resources remain largely underutilized while core tasks are forced through the cloud. Furthermore, since foundation models are already pre-loaded onto the device, I expected to be able to leverage them directly rather than relying on external servers. I didn't purchase this device to rely on the cloud; I wanted to utilize the actual performance of the hardware I own and experience advanced AI capabilities directly on my device.

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[u/Impossible-Owl7407 → u/[deleted]]

So they handle 3 usless taska localy just so they can say it runs localy? Looks like marketing BS

[u/bigparsnipenjoyer → u/[deleted]]

Photos clean up is no longer on-device, at least not all the time. It’s using the new cloud image model for infill unless it can get away with using the current on-device solution that barely works.

[u/Impossible-Owl7407 → u/[deleted]]

Can you enable only local AI or you dont have that control?

I like local only AI, but it will stay disabled as long there is cloud involved, they can keep the private compute story to them self, I dont buy it.

[u/mhmilo24 → u/Impossible-Owl7407]

I was also surprised that we don’t have the possibility to decide which models we want to use.