iOS 26 is bringing some big Apple Intelligence upgrades — but will they be enough to justify an iPhone upgrade?

Tom's Guide

6 hours ago

Getting an updated operating system can be like getting a brand new phone sometimes, especially if that update brings vital new features to your old device. And certainly, the recently previewed iOS 26 promises big changes, starting with an entirely new look for your iPhone.
But as we've previously noted, not every advertised iOS 26 feature is going to reach every iPhone capable of running the software update. Several major additions depend on Apple Intelligence, meaning you'll need an iPhone 15 Pro or later to reap the full benefits of iOS 26.
And that means anyone with an iPhone that's been out for two years or more will have to make a decision come the fall: Is it worth upgrading to a new iPhone capable of supporting all that iOS 26 has to offer.
It's the same question iPhone owners had to ask themselves a year ago when Apple Intelligence first debuted as part of iOS 18. Certainly, the answer was a bit more clear cut back then. While Apple Intelligence introduced some promising new tools, there was no can't-miss feature, making it easier to hold on to your current iPhone if you weren't fully ready to upgrade.
Will iOS 26 yield a different answer? It's hard to say at this point, as the software is only available as a developer beta. The iOS 26 public beta follows in July, and by then, we can get a better sense of what the new features bring to the table, including the ones that require Apple Intelligence support.
Still, it doesn't hurt to start thinking about these things now, especially if you're on the fence about upgrading to a new model once the iPhone 17 arrives in a few months' time. With pricing up in the air, you're going to want time to prep — and potentially save — to cover the cost of an upgrade, should those iOS 26 changes requiring Apple Intelligence prove to be irresistible.
I've been spending a little bit of time with the iOS 26 developer preview, though I've yet to install it on a test device that supports Apple Intelligence. Nevertheless, I have gotten a sense of which Apple Intelligence-powered additions to iOS 26 figure to be the most noteworthy — and the ones you're going to want to pay attention to as beta testing picks up steam this summer.
As a quick reminder, here's a rundown of the iOS 26 features that require Apple Intelligence. To use these capabilities, you're going to want an iPhone 15 Pro, iPhone 15 Pro Max, any iPhone 16 model including the iPhone 16e, or one of the new models Apple introduces later this year.
That's just a list of features where Apple Intelligence support is specified. There are other iOS 26 capabilities that may only work on the iPhone 15 or later. For example, iOS 26 Maps is adding a capability where on-device intelligence recognizes the routes you take regularly so that it can alert you to conditions like traffic — it's unclear if that requires Apple Intelligence support, but it sure sounds like it to me.
A quick glance at this list tells me that not all of these features are going to swing the needle toward an iPhone upgrade. If the initial release of Genmoji didn't move you to get a new phone, I'm going to guess expanding the kinds of emoji you can generate with text prompts isn't going to up the ante. Other additions, like incorporating Apple Intelligence into Reminders, sound a bit more promising, but the basic functionality of that app will continue to work just fine on your older iPhone.
To my eye, there are two potential Apple Intelligence additions in iOS 26 that could spark serious upgrade talk — Visual Intelligence and Live Translations.
Visual Intelligence is already the best of the Apple Intelligence features in my book. It essentially turns your camera into a search engine of its own, as you can snap photos and then have Apple Intelligence scour the web for more information online. I particularly like that I can point my iPhone's camera at a restaurant's sign and have Visual Intelligence pull up information like the menu. I can also capture info from a flier to auto-populate a calendar entry.
The iOS 26 update brings those capabilities to your iPhone's screen. Now you can take a screenshot and perform those same actions you would from capturing an image with your camera, including filling in calendar dates and times for an event mentioned in an email someone sent you.
To put it another way, Visual Intelligence is already a very useful feature, and iOS 26 is expanding those uses.
Live Translations is a bit more up in the air. Certainly, the concept is promising (and familiar to anyone who's spent time with a recent Pixel phone.) When you place a call to someone who speaks a different language than you do, Apple Intelligence will provide on-the-fly translations so that you can have a relatively seamless conversation. FaceTime conversations should work the same way, and if you text with someone who's using a different language in Messages, you'll get automatic translations of the messages you're sending out and receiving.
The value of Live Translations will depend on how much you interact with people who speak a different language than you. Travelers and people who do a lot of cross-border business figure to reap the largest benefit. But whether or not Live Translation is worth the upgrade will depend on just how well the feature performs — and that's something we'll get a better idea about as more people use the beta.
There's one other possibility would-be upgraders need to keep in mind — that there may be an Apple Intelligence addition in iOS 26 that Apple won't disclose until the iPhone 17 launch in the fall. The aforementioned Visual Intelligence started out life as an iPhone 16 exclusive before a subsequent iOS 18 update added iPhone 15 Pro compatibility.
The nice thing about a summer-long beta process is it gives you a chance to see how new features perform and whether or not they get fine-tuned ahead of the arrival of new hardware in the fall. That's especially helpful with something like Apple Intelligence, which continues to be a work in progress.
A lot of factors go into deciding whether to upgrade to a new phone or not — the status of your current model, whether the hardware itself makes compelling improvements and how much that new handset is going to run you. But Apple Intelligence features also figure to play a role in that decision, and the iOS 26 beta will give us some idea of how Apple's AI efforts are progressing.