A quiet hierarchy
Apple presented the new Apple Foundation Model 2 (AFM-2) at the keynote as an on-device multimodal model capable of understanding voice, text, and images. What wasn't explicitly highlighted on stage emerges from the technical notes in the first betas: not all Apple Intelligence-compatible devices can run AFM-2 locally.
As Thurrott reports based on official specifications, the minimum requirements for the advanced model are 12GB of RAM paired with an A19 Pro chip on iPhone, M4 on iPad, M3 on Mac. This effectively excludes the base iPhone 17 (which has 8GB), iPads with M2 or earlier, and Macs with M1 or M2 chips in 8GB configurations.
Who gets what
In practice, only the iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Air, M4 iPads with 12GB or more, and M3 (or later) Macs with at least 12GB of unified memory gain access to the most capable version of the on-device model. Devices with older hardware continue using first-generation AFM or rely on Private Cloud Compute. It's not a hard compatibility cut, but it's a stratification that will meaningfully split the user experience: two iPhone 17s in the same household could have noticeably different AI capabilities.