Apple Intelligence Features Now Require More Free Storage to Work in iOS 18.2

Highlights
  • Apple Intelligence features now require more free space on your device for it to work.
  • The new system requirements are applicable with the iOS 18.2 update.

Apple has increased the minimum storage requirements for the compatibility of Apple Intelligence features. You need to keep at least 7GB of free space on your device to run these features. Earlier, the requirement was just 4GB. Here are the details.

Apple Intelligence Minimum Storage Requirements Raised to 7GB

Apple Intelligence features were released to the public with the iOS 18.1 update. Since a majority of these features work locally on a device utilising Apple Silicon’s NPU, they also require some free space to process the data.

During its initial launch, the company mentioned that Apple Intelligence features will require at least 4GB of free space on any compatible iPhone, Mac, iPad, or any other device. If enough storage is not available, the features will not work on that Apple device.

Apple has officially raised the minimum storage requirements to 7GB. The changes come into effect with the iOS 18.2 update. Apple has also updated the new requirements on its official website.

The 7GB free space is common for all Apple devices, irrespective of the storage variant that you are using. For example, whether you have a 128GB iPhone or a 1TB iPhone, you need to have at least 7GB free space to activate and use Apple Intelligence features.

Why have Storage Requirements Increased for Apple Intelligence Features?

The new storage requirements are applicable with the iOS 18.2 update, which also brought new Apple Intelligence features. These include Genmoji, ChatGPT Integration in Siri, Image Playground, Visual Intelligence, Compose texts with ChatGPT, and more.

We recently tested the Image Playground and other latest Apple Intelligence features available in India. You can read more about them here.

Image Playground feature in Apple Intelligence

All of these features work on on specific large language models, and a major part of this processing happens locally on the device. Due to this reason, only the iPhone 15 Pro and its following models are compatible with these features as they require higher computing power from the NPU. The Apple A17 Pro chip is the bare minimum requirement, followed by all M-Series processors on Macbooks and iPads.

The increased number of Apple Intelligence features in iOS 18.2 also meant that your iPhone and other devices need to process more data simultaneously. This may have eventually led Apple to raise the minimum storage requirements to 7GB instead of 4GB.

It is worth noting that the reasons mentioned above are speculative based on the working of typical AI features. Apple has not officially disclosed the reason for changing the system requirements.