American company Apple has revealed its aim to ship 90 million units of the iPhone 16 in the second half of this year, relying on artificial intelligence services to stimulate demand for the new model. The company informed suppliers and partners that it targets approximately a 10 percent increase in shipments of the new iPhones compared to previous models, according to an informed source. Bloomberg reported that around 81 million units of the iPhone 15 were shipped in the second half of 2023.
Informed sources indicated that the company is confident that adding some features of the Apple Intelligence platform to the iPhone 16 will help boost demand when the model is launched for sale at the end of this year. At its annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) held earlier last month, Apple officially announced its partnership with OpenAI, the creator of the famous ChatGPT system, with the aim of bringing features of that system to Apple devices this year.
During the event, Craig Federighi, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Software Engineering, discussed the relationship between Google’s Gemini generative AI model and the possibility of integrating it into Apple Intelligence in the future. According to Federighi, the goal is to eventually enable users to choose the models they prefer. The company also held similar discussions with Anthropic and Perplexity, two companies working in the generative AI field; however, no agreements have been reached with them as of now. The partnership with OpenAI has been the only one confirmed so far. The GPT-4 model from OpenAI will be integrated into Apple Intelligence to support the Siri voice assistant and other tools.
