Apple: Siri Will Not be Coming to Older Devices

Apple has confirmed today that personal assistant Siri will not be coming to any device older than the iPhone 4S, dispelling rumours that it would be made available to everyone.

Siri was announced last month and was described as a beta product, giving hope to Apple fans that, once out of beta testing, Siri would be made available on older models like the iPhone 4, iPod touch and iPad.

An iOS developer, Michael Steeber, asked Apple if Siri would be part of a special, paid update to iOS 5, and Apple replied:

"Engineering has provided the following feedback regarding the issue:
Siri only works on iPhone 4S and we currently have no plans to support older devices."

Hackers and jailbreakers have proven in recent weeks that Siri does indeed work on the iPhone 4, dispelling initial thoughts that anything older than the iPhone 4S would not have the processing power to run Siri.

In fact, Siri uses Apple's own servers to generate answers to questions asked by the user and the older A4 processor can handle Siri. One stumbling block for hackers has been that Apple's severs only accept Siri requests from the 4S, and requests from an iPhone 4 are met with no response.

As TechCrunch points out: "When it comes down to it, it simply doesn't make business sense for Apple to move Siri onto older devices. The company disappointed many by bringing the exact same design to the table later this year, and Siri is the number one defence against that."

If this doesn't confirm that Siri won't be coming to older models, it seems that the voice activated personal assistant is having scaling issues. There was a server outage last week that stopped Siri from working for many users, so adding millions of iPhone 4 and iPad users would surely have a detrimental effect on the application.