Apple’s newly introduced AI Siri will have limited use across much of the ​company’s install base because older iPhones lack the ‌capabilities to run advanced AI features, Morgan Stanley said in a research note on Tuesday.

More ​than 850 million iPhones are incapable ​of running basic Apple Intelligence queries, and ⁠more than 1.3 billion iPhones cannot ​use advanced Siri features, the brokerage said.

The ​long-delayed Siri overhaul was the centrepiece of Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference on Monday, with the world’s most ​valuable smartphone maker betting on the ​feature to keep pace with rivals including OpenAI's ChatGPT, ‌Google’s ⁠Gemini, and Anthropic’s Claude.

Selling hardware on the strength of software is challenging, Morgan Stanley cautioned, even as AI accessibility ranks among the ​leading drivers ​of smartphone ⁠upgrades.

The bottleneck for the upgraded Siri and AI tools comes ​down to chip architecture and memory. ​Users ⁠need 12 GB of unified memory to run the most advanced Siri features, owing ⁠to ​the volume of on-device ​processing that Apple Intelligence requires, the brokerage said.