Apple’s new iOS 16 update is available for the iPhone X and later, but some features are locked and only offered to owners of newer devices. According to experts, Apple cannot avoid this.
iOS 16 – Features Not Working on Older iPhones
While most iOS 16 features will be available to all compatible iPhones, some, including two accessibility features, require more modern iPhones to work at all. It’s a move that means people whose non-compliant iPhones will have to upgrade if they want the full iOS 16 experience, but experts believe Apple did the right thing in doing so, and may not have had much choice in the matter.
“I’m afraid the reality is that there are hardware limitations when it comes to some features,” Carolina Milanesi, President & Principal Analyst at Creative Strategies, told Lifewire via email. “The processing power or AI/Machine Learning capabilities are just not all created equal,” she added, suggesting that older chips simply don’t have the capabilities that some features require.
The list of features that modern iPhones require isn’t long, but it does include a few notable ones. One glaring missing feature is one that Apple showed off during its iOS 16 reveal event in June: the ability to extract objects and people from an image and paste them elsewhere. Apple says people will need an “iPhone with A12 Bionic and later” to use the feature, meaning iPhone XS or newer devices are good to go, but older ones aren’t.