Although jailbreak hackers of Apple’s devices has proven that it is possible to use Siri on older iPhone, iPod and iPad devices, officially Apple only wants Siri on its latest iPhone 4S handsets. The limitation seems to be completely artificial, but it makes a lot of sense for Apple to not let Siri onto devices used by the masses.

Following reports about unauthorized enabling of Siri on older devices, a software designer proposed Apple to release a special version of iOS 5 for older smartphones, players and tablets with Siri support. The version was supposed to cost around $20 and add support for the highly-advertized Siri voice control capability of the iPhone 4S to older devices by Apple. However, the company does not want to do this.

“Engineering has provided the following feedback regarding this issue: Siri only works on iPhone 4S and we currently have no plans to support older devices,” an email sent by Apple to software developers Michael Steeber reads.

The limitation seems to be artificial as Siri could be enabled easily on the iPad 2, which has the same A5 system-on-chip as the iPhone 4S. But it looks like the company has reasons to limit the capability to only one device. Siri relies not only onto the internal hardware of the iPhone 4S, but also onto Apple’s datacenters. In case there are too many requests to those datacenters, they may not be able to handle all of them and fail.

Tags: Apple, iPhone