8 ms·

Smartphone buyers meh on AI, care more about battery life

324 points by retskrad 2y ago

eleveriven 2y ago
We’re in an era of "subscription fatigue" and smartphone makers adding another monthly fee could be a tough sell
EasyMark 2y ago
“Turn off the local AI and let me have that extra power” . I think that’s what most people think. I certainly use AI for some tasks, but I don’t need AI everywhere 24/7 in my pocket.
brtkdotse 2y ago
Never mind AI, I just want Siri to have better text-to-speech quality than my freaking vacuum cleaner.
- xp84 2y ago
  Hey now, Siri’s speech-to-text quality is also worse quality than a vacuum cleaner’s too.
- NotYourLawyer 2y ago
  That’s AI though…
- JohnMakin 2y ago
  It's incredible how bad it is. It actually seems to be getting worse year by year. I nearly crashed my car on the freeway trying to set a reminder to pay a toll the other day - I changed my mind and tried to get siri to cancel the action, and no matter what I said, she kept asking "what time? what time? what time?" on endless loop, and when siri is activated on my car's dashboard, I can't see the map - forcing me to avert my attention from the road, disconnect my phone, then plug it back in and pull my map up again. She can't do or understand the most astoundingly basic stuff. I guess maybe it "feels" worse now because most LLM's are pretty good at understanding your meaning/intention, but my god, it's so bad that if I were in charge of that product I'd rip it out entirely. There's no way anyone finds any real use out of it.
  - immibis 2y ago
    FWIW you were not forced to distract yourself from the road - officially, you should have got off the freeway at the next exit and parked before sorting stuff out.
    - JohnMakin 2y ago
      I mean, sure. Or this could just work how it's marketed to work. Thanks for the helpful reminder!
    - alt227 2y ago
      When something is called CarPlay and actively marketed as a way to use your phone services whilst driving, you would expect it to have a good enough UX that doesnt detract from safe driving to use it.
      - immibis 2y ago
        The law doesn't care what marketing you received and neither does physics. Don't crash your car over a radio.
        alt227 2y ago
        I didnt, I wont, and nor did the parent post. You seem to have conjured up a scenario just to be condescending. Dont do that. CarPlay or anything else designed to use while driving should never fail to the point of distracting the driver. If it does, its broken and not fit for market. IMO in this instance, Sirri should have recognised that CarPlay was activated, that it had not got an answer it recognised multiple times in a row, and failed safe saying 'Pull over to continue' or something like that. Hiding the current navigation map and asking the same question over and over again to the point of distraction shows the system is not fit for pupose and shouldnt be used whilst driving.
  - bluGill 2y ago
    Even if everything worked you should not be trying to do that while driving. Keep your attention on the road - you are in control of several tons of metal moving at deadly speeds. (don't sing a long with the radio either)
- jermaustin1 2y ago
  I need better speech to text. I have to repeat my text message 5+ times sometimes when sending it through carplay. I'm not talking about anything long either. A handful of words that my accent just doesn't work with. More than once per day I get fed up enough to pull over and text it.
- yellow_lead 2y ago
  And the vacuum cleaner really sucks
- binarymax 2y ago
  It’s gotta be just barely holding on in some legacy environment right now. I’m surprised they don’t just start over using new tech. Maybe that’s the end goal with on-device inference to sunset cloud Siri.
  - grahamj 2y ago
    I think it’s at least partly cost reduction. Push everything to the phone so people have to pay more for phones and they pay less for infra. Win-win. Otherwise why don’t they let older devices use their server-side private LLM setup?
    - Benjaminsen 2y ago
      OpenAI whisper runs on iOS native on device, can't be just costs. https://github.com/openai/whisper/discussions/407 https://github.com/openai/whisper/discussions/407
- neither_color 2y ago
  I have a bunch of "premium" smart outlets(eve energy, some are "THREAD" enabled, all the bells and whistles) all named and connected to things I want to toggle with voice: a small radiator, an air purifier, a humidifier, some accent lamps, a fan, an infrared therapy lamp etc. -Before anyone asks, I ordered the European version of their energy strip for higher wattage stuff-. I give each one a clear and unambiguous name, and still, at least one in ten times Siri will be confused about what I'm asking and turn off EVERY SINGLE OUTLET IN THE ROOM. It's endlessly frustrating. For what it's worth the outlets never de-sync or disconnect like the random amazon ones do so I blame it purely on Siri.
- techbrovanguard 2y ago
  siri’s speech recognition and intent handling is so comically bad. as of late, for some unknown reason, when i ask siri to favourite the current song while driving it curtly replies that it doesn’t know which speaker i’m referring to. this used to work. another fun problem is siri not recognising my speech despite me not having a particularly strong accent, speaking slowly, and enunciating. i’ve gotten into the habit putting on a valley girl or bbc news anchor voice while using siri since that usually works. whoever is in charge of siri needs a reality check, the feature is borderline unusable.
mondobe 2y ago
I have a hard time seeing how this isn't obvious. 95% of everyday AI needs (for the people that even bother to interact with it) are covered by ChatGPT, and most of that is the same stuff that Google was handling before. From personal experience, the only thing that changed when replacing the "old" Google Assistant with the Gemini-powered one on my Pixel was that it's no longer able to create reminders.
- JohnClark1337 2y ago
  [dead]
- jeffbee 2y ago
  I just asked my Pixel to remind me next Tuesday to pick the bananas, and it set that in Google Tasks. Which part of this doesn't work?
  - kspacewalk2 2y ago
    I've set a reminder through Gemini, then tried to change its time. Told me there are no active reminders to change. Created another reminder with correct time. Got both reminders.
    - jeffbee 2y ago
      I said "Hey Google instead of reminding me about the bananas on Tuesday, remind me on Wednesday" and that worked. It's quite possible these things only work on Android 15 QPR 1, or only on a Pixel Pro, or who knows. Its capabilities have noticeably expanded in the last few months. One thing I know it still can't do, that the old Assistant did, is control a Sonos. ETA: The joke is I don't even have Google Tasks installed, so I am not sure what effect those Tasks items would have. They might only surface on the side pane of Gmail.
    - lupire 2y ago
      Failing to set reminders/alarms is core Google technology, #2 only to PageRank itself.
tracerbulletx 2y ago
For it to have value they need to effectively apply it for something useful and have it be reliable, not just go hey we have llms. like if i could say siri share my location with my wife and text her "im on my way" oh and send her a pic of what im looking at through my sunglasses. And it worked 99% of the time, and could figure out to do it through google maps because she has android, that would be great.
- chankstein38 2y ago
  And, to me, none of that even sounds like AI. Just an assistant app, smart glasses, and google maps not being shit. I can't think of a reason, other than the reasons I already use ChatGPT and the AI object eraser, that I would need AI on my phone. Most of the crap they pump out is just a solution looking for a problem.
- xp84 2y ago
  Exactly. I remember imagining naively in 2010 that the introduction of Siri meant I would be able to just ask my phone to do simple things like update settings or manipulate the built-in apps using natural language, things chatGPT could easily do even a year ago if it had the needed API hooks. Including doing things on a schedule, compound sentences, etc. Instead we got a very brittle text adventure that can neither correctly transcribe your words, let alone understand your intention, and it’s never even changed. “Siri get me directions to McDonald’s” ‘I found this on the web for you:’ <serp for “Direct In Donald”> Or it would get directions to a McDonalds in a different state. Or say “I’m sorry, I don’t see a McDonald in your contacts.”
brianshaler 2y ago
I'd rather have flagship specs in a smaller package. The smallest in the iPhone (SE) and Pixel ("A"?) lines are still too big and tend to have previous-gen specs
- dwayne_dibley 2y ago
  Same boat. 'upgraded' my iphone mini to a 15 and hate it. Far far to big.
- tra3 2y ago
  I’ve got an appointment with Apple to replace the battery in my iPhone 13 mini. I would love the new features (especially the camera and sat comm) but I’m not willing to get a bigger form factor device.
  - efficax 2y ago
    there are dozens of us! dozens!!! i’m also keeping my 13 mini until it’s dead
    - tra3 2y ago
      I’ll upgrade the second a new mini comes out…but I’m keeping it for now.
  - diggan 2y ago
    > I’ve got an appointment with Apple to replace the battery in my iPhone 13 mini. I literally was in the Apple store yesterday for the same purpose (with a 12 mini). I'd also love the new features and hardware, but after trying all the available sizes in the store, they're all too big. My wife on the other hand(s), loves to have a phone she needs to hold with two hands to even be able to use, so obviously she has the Pro Max. I don't understand how people are OK with that, but to each and their own...
    - auxreturn 2y ago
      To each their own, except apple's not making new mini form-factor iphones anymore so us mini preferrers will at some point not have our own.
jeffbee 2y ago
Alternate hed: 99% of smartphone buyers have no idea which features are supported by machine inference.
- voxadam 2y ago
  99% of smartphone buyers have no idea what machine inference is.
  - jeffbee 2y ago
    So why are we surveying them on "AI"?
    - debo_ 2y ago
      So that people can skip reading the article and just post their feelings in the HN comments.
    - recursive 2y ago
      Because "AI" is used in lots of consumer-facing marketing
mouse_ 2y ago
I would pay extra to -not- have AI in my phone. AI belongs on mainframes, out of my way when I don't want it.
- xp84 2y ago
  This is an underrated take. Apple, especially, wants to leverage their excellent silicon to do “AI” locally in the name of privacy purely as a marketing advantage, but the tradeoffs there are major (burning my battery instead of data center AC power, plus, my phone will never be better or faster than some big metal GPU with fans), and the privacy issue could just as well be solved by doing a good job designing the server side architecture and educating people that unlike when talking to a person, it’s trivial for a model to “not learn anything from” a conversation, and that that’s in fact automatically how it works unless you’re logging the conversations and purposely feeding them back in.
  - xvector 2y ago
    You can use their cloud instead of local compute if you'd like: https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/ https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/ Building a privacy aware cloud is a lot harder than you think it is. Apple is going the whole way with remote attestation, hardware root of trust, software BOM, etc. https://security.apple.com/blog/pcc-security-research/ https://security.apple.com/blog/pcc-security-research/
    - xp84 2y ago
      They are, and I actually believe that they’ve done a good job of all that stuff (though suspect that using their weird Mac hardware in the DC can’t possibly be a truly superior option to the NVIDIA hardware the entire rest of the world is using, but let’s assume I’m wrong). But are you suggesting I will be able to flip a switch to use their cloud for all the same AI stuff instead of my battery-powered phone? That would be really welcome news! I haven’t used any of the betas so I know nothing about how “Apple Intelligence” works.
      - 2y ago
nerdjon 2y ago
My opinion is that most of the real uses of AI (like ML has always been) will be largely hidden things that are LLM based but not screaming at your face "AI". Particularly once the bubble pops and money stops being shoved into things just sticking an LLM in a pretty package with little to no value. Some of the things coming in iOS like notification summaries and similar features are big examples. It's clearly LLM based but it's not a lot of the shoving AI needlessly into things that we are seeing now and provides a true improvement given the notification overload that we have right now.
- slashdave 2y ago
  Photo manipulation is another example. You can see the wisdom of how Apple is approaching this. In particular, to be on device whenever possible so as not to be dependent on network bandwidth, and to tie features to new hardware (to drive sales).
  - soco 2y ago
    How I wish this would actually work properly. One can have only so many sepia filters and cat ears before realizing photo manipulation still does the same it was doing ten years ago. I have yet to see an app actually improving the photo quality - and no, doubling the pixels is not that. Yes, you cannot create details where they are missing, but sometimes they should be obvious, like fixing the foliage (leaves in the distance always look like... leaves), trying to clarify the contours (not only by bumping the contrast) and I could go on. Yet no, every new AI-powered image processor only brings a new approach to sepia filters and adding cat ears.
- KeytarHero 2y ago
  Exactly. Ask customers "do you want AI in your phone?" and their response will probably be "meh", as shown in the article. But ask "do you want notification summaries, a better camera in low light, Siri to be able to look up more things, searchable photos, etc?" - and they absolutely will.
  - effingwewt 2y ago
lopkeny12ko 2y ago
At this point I would pay a premium to have replaceable batteries again.
- Syonyk 2y ago
  My Sonim XP3+ has a hard shell replaceable battery and lasts a week and a half on a charge. It's not even a very expensive device, it's under $150! ;) But it is a flip phone running Android Go with no apps... That said, I think the tradeoffs being made right now are probably the right ones. Apple's latest devices have gone to an electrically released sort of adhesive (versus the older pull-strip removeable adhesive, which is a big step up from the "glue it in" approach many vendors take), and for a given volume, you get more battery if you can rely on the phone to protect it from damage - which is why almost everything with an internal battery uses some variety of pouch cell. They're quite a bit more fragile than the hard-cased batteries, but you get a lot more battery in the volume than you do with the hard cased ones. As long as it's not incredibly irritating to replace the battery, I'm fine optimizing the daily use thing (battery life in a given phone size) over the once-every-few-years thing (replacing the battery).
  - ghaff 2y ago
    Getting someone to replace a battery every 4 or 5 years really isn’t onerous. And for iPhones the magnetic batteries that attach to the back are a pretty effective way to stretch battery life a bunch more hours if you need to.
- jollyllama 2y ago
  Field-swappable is a must
ipsum2 2y ago
People think of chatGPT now when they hear AI, but for on-device its more like speech recognition, image keyword search, and keyboard next word prediction.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
Syonyk 2y ago
> The biggest motivation for US adult smartphone owners to upgrade their devices is longer battery life (61%)... Battery replacements are a thing. They're apparently not a common thing, unfortunately, because that might impact new phone sales... and even on devices where it's trivial, people don't seem to do it. A decade ago or so I was doing a lot of Nexus 5 battery swaps for people because one of the battery OEMs was shipping junk and the batteries were shot in a year. I really wish OEMs would put bigger batteries in phones. It improves everything. Not only do you get longer initial battery life, you can handle far more "battery aging" before things stop working right. You still have a day's battery life (which I expect is what most people actually mean - they want their phone to last the day without thinking about it) even with capacity loss, and a larger battery can have more internal resistance increase (another factor of battery aging) before it sags too badly under the load to keep voltage up. Based on the fact that easily 90+% of phones I see in the wild have cases on them, physical size and thickness isn't a big factor (and those newer folding screen devices are massive when folded). Another few mm doesn't matter when phones live in purses, men's pockets, or jackets. ... or just go back to a modern flip phone sort of device, get a week and a half battery life, and stop worrying about remembering to charge your phone. ;)
- Sohcahtoa82 2y ago
  > Based on the fact that easily 90+% of phones I see in the wild have cases on them, physical size and thickness isn't a big factor Everyone says this, but I wonder if the sales data says otherwise, because device manufacturers, especially Apple, REALLY love to advertise how thin their devices are. Personally, I don't want a super thin device because I feel like the slightest bending force is going to snap it in half. It's absolutely wild to me that people will store their phones in their back pocket.
  - Syonyk 2y ago
    Apple's mobile division still seems to struggle with the ghost of Jony Ive. At least their laptop division was willing to rethink things with the Apple Silicon transition and go back to things that worked. The late Intel-era portable Macs were simply broken, because of Ive's apparent obsession with "thin for thin's sake." Or, more probably, "thin for the sake of industrial design awards." They innovated 20% too much on keyboard design with the butterfly keyboard that was simply a bad design. I don't know what else to call a keyboard that reliably breaks after a few years of service. But, bad though that it is, it was even worse because you couldn't replace the keyboard. You had to replace the whole top case and battery, at something like $700, when one key went bad, because the whole thing was integrated to save a mm or two. Not only did they un-solve a solved problem (reliable laptop keyboards), they even un-solved the ability to replace a keyboard when it gets mangled, or something spills in it, or a random failure happens. But, worse, they went with the USB-C only design (the thinnest port!), meaning that every owner of one of those laptops I knew had a pile of assorted adapters in their bag so they could do things that most people want to do every now and then with a laptop, like drive an external display for a presentation, read a USB-A storage device, or read a micro SD card. Yes, the laptop was thinner, but at the cost of needing to carry extra stuff with you to work around the lack of ports. And then, because it was so thin, they didn't have space to properly cool the zorching-fast Intel chips they put in them, and the chips would throttle badly while baking the machine. The M-series laptops, shocking me incredibly, threw all that "design" out the window, and went back to something actually useful. They cool well (admittedly, that's mostly the Apple Silicon barely needing cooling), they fixed the keyboard, and the machines have a useful set of ports on the side for "common tasks with a laptop" (SD, HDMI, headphone, plus the USB-C/Thunderbolt ports - still no A ports, though). And then enough battery to last just about forever. Anyway, I hope their phone division works this sort of thing out too.
behnamoh 2y ago
I've been trying the iOS Beta 18.2 and here's my impression of Apple Intelligence: It's not bad, it's really really bad. The image clean-up feature is utterly useless, and I think it's one of the areas where we can clearly see the difference between a company for whom Generative AI is an afterthought (Apple), and the competition. I paid $1500 for the new iPhone Pro Max and a great part of the deal was the Apple Intelligence support, but frankly, I might as well switch to Android at this point because I'm really disappointed at Apple's take on AI. I'll probably wait until the official Apple Intelligence is introduced but tbh I don't think there will be much improvements over this version. And as for Siri: It's as stupid as it ever was. I ask it to convert something from lbs to kg and it responds "there's no music playing". If anything, its natural language comprehension has degraded. Currently, there's no context awareness, so I still can't ask Siri "how do I respond to this email?". Really, the only thing that "works" is the ChatGPT feature that describes an image you send it. Anything Apple-related is bonkers. It's really embarrassing.
- xvector 2y ago
  Apple has always sucked in AI and they have never formed the culture necessary to enable and attract top ML talent. They developed Siri years ago and have stagnated since. As far as the future of compute goes, Meta seems like it has a much more compelling argument with the Orion glasses and their investment in AI.
  - behnamoh 2y ago
    > Apple has always sucked in AI Yes, but Apple fans always respond by saying "...but Apple has been using ML in much of the OS for years, you just don't see it..." I really want Apple to be better at this, but Generative AI is too uncontrollable for a control-freak company.
  - fhd2 2y ago
    They didn't even develop Siri, they acquired it. Doesn't seem like they've done all that much with it beyond integrating and marketing it, but I could be wrong.
zomg 2y ago
what's a realistic use case for ai on a mobile phone? i have yet to find myself saying "gee, if only i had ai on my phone, i could do XYZ!"
- diggan 2y ago
  I'd love it if CarPlay/Siri just could read out stuff it finds on the Internet. Currently, all I can get out of it is "Sorry, I cannot show this to you right now" for basically everything except trying to control multimedia. At one point, I had ChatGPT working via voice in CarPlay mode (via Shortcuts I think?), but seems like Apple disabled that at one point, for some stupid reason probably.
- 1000100_1000101 2y ago
  On iPhone, if I take a picture of a plant or animal, it identifies it for me. It's not 100% by any means, but it's useful enough. I've figured out what were baby plants I wanted vs. weeds. I've figure out species of birds I'd taken photos of with my SLR (ie: phone takes picture of Lightroom editing the image, and is able to identify it from that... I'd prefer there was a way to not require me to take a photo of my monitor, either doing it "live", and/or adding the functionality into the Mac.) For people and pets it can find other images that contain the same subject. When my daughter was studying Chinese, I could use the live-video translation app and see the lesson text translated to English, and see her hand-written answers also translated to English. I could see this being more broadly useful when travelling, along with live translation of spoken words.
  - HWR_14 2y ago
    While true your examples are AI, I believe in this case AI is being used in this context to mean LLM-based AI. I don't know if LLM-based translation is better than previous translation models.
    - 1000100_1000101 2y ago
      While the AI focus these days is on LLMs, AFAICT, the NPUs and GPU accelerators are just generically fast MUL, and MAD machines with varying precisions, which should help any AI, and even non-AI tasks likes image filter kernels. Getting hardware to enable faster AI processing on phones should be good thing if used for useful tasks, LLM or not.
rcarmo 2y ago
Zero surprises here. I work with AI daily and am on the same boat.
JadeNB 2y ago
What surprises me about the story is how weak the effect is, which is stripped by the title mangler: only 25% of users report not finding AI features helpful.
lexicality 2y ago
The foldable phone thing later in the article is fun, because I actually do want a foldable phone. I'd love to have a smaller phone with a screen that gets bigger for things like watching movies while traveling. But the thing is, before buying one I borrowed one from a friend and it was absolute shit! The software hardly worked, the hinges felt horrible to open and it was still too big even when folded up. I thought I was going to break it constantly while holding it.
jonplackett 2y ago
These stats seem like the reverse of the story in the headline > A quarter of smartphone owners (25%) don't find AI features helpful, So does that mean 75% _do_ find AI Feature helpful? > 45% are reluctant to pay a monthly subscription fee for AI capabilities Are 55% happy to pay a monthly fee? >34% have privacy concerns. 66% have no privacy concerns?
- galleywest200 2y ago
  The graph has multiple options for some of these. 45% unwilling to pay a monthly fee, 6% willing to pay a monthly fee.
- devindotcom 2y ago
  This data is in the article >So does that mean 75% _do_ find AI Feature helpful? 14% find it helpful >Are 55% happy to pay a monthly fee? 6% are willing to pay >66% have no privacy concerns? no stat on this but I think we can assume based on the others that it is not split evenly because that was not the methodology
  - WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
    >>66% have no privacy concerns? > no stat on this but... I think we could presume an answer - if the respondents first received a full accounting of how their phones track and record their lives, along with a full list of who is getting that data.
  - jonplackett 2y ago
    Thanks. That’s clearer! Ok my next comeback - people are treating AI tools like a musical instrument. It’s like picking up a guitar for the first time, twanging a few strings and saying ‘Nah, this sounds shit’. Guitars are useless. I’d never pay for a guitar. Even chatGPT has a learning curve. I save myself hours or days per day using it for all sorts of things. Anyone who says they can’t find a use for AI is just lazy and hasn’t tried hard.
    - recursive 2y ago
jmugan 2y ago
I still can't control my iPhone with my voice in the car. Siri doesn't work well for me. Maybe there is another way I have missed, but I'm amazed this functionality is still lacking.
rishikeshs 2y ago
Why can’t they make smaller phones?
- slashdave 2y ago
  They can. It just that no one wants to buy them.
  - rishikeshs 2y ago
    Is it so? Everyone who sees my iphone 13 mini wants it. It’s going at crazy prices in the second hand market
jdalgetty 2y ago
We'll care more about AI when it's better.
jdlyga 2y ago
GPT-4o is helpful, and so is NotebookLM. The problem is that "AI" features built into a lot of products aren't that useful.
drivingmenuts 2y ago
In re: AI on my phone - it's sort of interesting, but really not worth having because it's not smart enough nor capable of being smart enough. It lacks "judgement", which is what I really needs, instead of slavish attention to detail coupled with hallucinations.
chankstein38 2y ago
I can understand why. Most of the generative AI crap we're being force-fed these days is a solution looking for a problem. On my Samsung, the only really useful AI features they provide are erasing things in photos and upscaling. The generation is weak compared to even basic stable diffusion and otherwise they're all fluff features and sometimes give me the same vibes as the "Make Longer" feature on Notion. As far as apps go, I really don't need a chatbot in every app.
agentultra 2y ago
I actively don’t want AI, on-device or not. But with the near monopolies on these devices there isn’t a way to vote with your wallet. We’re getting whether we want it or not.
- hkon 2y ago
  You can have a dumb phone. If you require one for 2fa. Just have one in addition for that purpose. But you can also sms 2fa on many services
  - goblinux 2y ago
    The hard part with 2FA over SMS is that it's no longer considered secure [1]. I want a dumb phone too, but with all the security tools we need (password manager, 2FA apps/tokens, encrypted messaging, etc.) it's becoming less and less an option for me. I wish there was a middle ground where I could have my phone be dumb enough to keep me from playing on it all the time, but secure enough that it makes sense for me. [1] https://www.okta.com/blog/2020/10/sms-authentication/ https://www.okta.com/blog/2020/10/sms-authentication/ I'm not affiliated with them, just the first article I found on the topic
  - meindnoch 2y ago
    I don't want a dumb phone. I want a smartphone without AI crap.
  - m01 2y ago
    For 2FA try a Yubikey or similar hardware U2F device. (opinion my own)
CharlieDigital 2y ago
I think the mistake a lot of companies are making with their approach to AI is making AI some "other" interface that you have to interact with explicitly. This chat bot approach is only one paradigm for using AI and it's probably the worst one in most use cases. Amazon Rufus, for example, falls into this category and it's hard to even remember to engage with it. On the other hand, Amazon is happy to serve me absolute trash search results. What most people probably want is an AI that can, for example, help organize their calendar transparently. Have a meeting coming up with a client? What if the AI can use tools to go find the latest info about the client? Check their LinkedIn, check their X, check their blog, research their company, give you a tear sheet on topics to discuss based on this in the calendar notes. If a user has to directly interact and instruct the AI, it feels like it defeats the purpose.
aithrowawaycomm 2y ago
It has been especially frustrating to read about Apple Intelligence on my 2022 iPhone with iOS Safari, where some JavaScript bugs that have been around since 2012 seem to be slightly worse in the latest update, and occasionally the entire app just freezes for no good reason, even if I've closed all other tabs. Not to mention how often I have to reset my entire 2021 iPad because the audio drivers get into a bad state. I suppose "stability improvements in WebKit" doesn't do much for Apple's stock price compared to SiriGPT. But this is feeling like death-by-1000-cuts: I don't think users are deeply committed to Apple UX/etc. I believe Apple's US market dominance is largely due to burnt fingers around Android's unreliability and annoyances between 2010-2020 (e.g. Google and Samsung not playing nice, badly orchestrated version changes). This was never a permanent state of affairs; Android has stabilized significantly and is more harmonized among competing manufacturers, while retaining its advantages on price and ease of development. Apple seems complacent on the basics, and is overextending into an AI product few users seem to want.
FireSquid2006 2y ago
Man I really just want email, texting, and a web browser on my phone. More "stuff" to do is an anti feature for me.
- hollandheese 2y ago
  Maybe Apple actually had it right with the first iPhone. No apps, just e-mail, texting and a good web browser.
- akho 2y ago
  I want maps, a taxi/bike rental app, banking, notes, a camera, a music player, tickets for stuff, and a TOTP gizmo. You’ll say I can do most of that in a browser, but then you’ve just moved complexity around.
ricardobeat 2y ago
A bit of a chicken and egg problem, isn’t it? Since really useful AI feature’s don’t really exist yet, why would one expect the general public to want it? Check again in six months.
aiono 2y ago
AI companies are desperately trying to find actual use cases but it seems like there is not that much to justify current investment.
- amateuring 2y ago
  bingo
- Nicholas_C 2y ago
  Sounds a little like crypto although there are actual use cases for AI. Just not as many as investors think.
  - changing1999 2y ago
    It's very similar in regards to treating the increase in compute power consumption as a signal of "growth".
  - marcosdumay 2y ago
    There are lots and lots of use cases for good AI. Those LLMs we have around just aren't that.
    - chairmansteve 2y ago
      Like VR. Lots of niche uses will emerge. But not much main stream adoption.
- bobro 2y ago
  It’s been enough time now that we should really have a handful of very clear use cases, but we just don’t.
- GuB-42 2y ago
  Here, it is more like the smartphone market is stagnating and manufacturers need something to encourage people to buy new smartphones instead of keeping the one they already have. They are already doing planned obsolescence, with hard to replace batteries, limited software support combined with closed systems, etc... But they can't abuse it, as regulatory agencies are already after them and customers are starting to notice. They had a go with cameras, as it is a significant differentiator, but nowadays, most smartphone cameras are as good as they can be for what they are used for. And it turns out that AI is the big hype right now, so of course, they are using as a selling point. The funny part is that "AI" (machine learning techniques) have been running in smartphones for a while (I'd say a decade), hidden in camera software. How do you think these tiny cameras can do pictures that look so good? But they mostly kept quiet about it, as it had implications of making "fakes". And yeah, stuff like Siri that works mostly on servers, you don't need a phone with "AI capabilities" for that, just internet access, but they are certainly going to put in in their ads.
AdamN 2y ago
AI is a means to an end - it's the end that people want (or don't want). For example people like fast and accurate spell check - they don't care whether AI did it or not.
pjmlp 2y ago
Of course, they are gimmicks to attempt to sell new phones, now that the market has stagnated, many folks even have two or more phones, and hardly need fancy features.
brailsafe 2y ago
Maybe it's just me, but I'd prefer to spend less of my life on my phone in general. Seems like first-party integration of AI features is just a ploy to persuade me to use it more, since the appeal of novel apps or software features has long since died out.
racl101 2y ago
I could not care less about AI on my phone. I don't want to learn to use it nor do I want to give it free reign over my content. If I can disable it on any smartphone I own I will. Of course, aside from checking email and calendar I don't do a lot of work from my phone.
deleted 2y ago
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varispeed 2y ago
Every time a company shoves AI into their product I see the won't eat cereal meme.
6gvONxR4sf7o 2y ago
The only AI thing that excites me on my phone is a battery-friendly way for app developers to run ML models. I don't want an AI assistant that sees everything that i do, but some things like computer vision and translation and OCR are handy to have a super efficient coprocessor for, and I could see interesting apps using ML increasingly. But that's kind of a second order thing. I'm sure apple and them are also trying to figure out how to also let app devs use their strongest foundation models too without every app wanting to download 100GB of weights.
Closi 2y ago
It's because current AI is meh on a phone. Once someone manages to combine Siri's phone integration + ChatGPT Voice mode and it runs locally I will be very interested. Until then, I'm a bit meh on it.
rsynnott 2y ago
Today in incredibly obvious things... Smartphones are an absolute graveyard of fads; remember the 3D screen phones, the phones with projectors, and so forth? They generally go nowhere. I suspect 'AI' on phones will be similar. Overwhelmingly, what people want out of phones is "like my current phone, but with better battery life and maybe a better camera." Previously 'faster' was also a concern, but modern phones are largely Good Enough.
- changing1999 2y ago
  Even camera improvements are overblown. My usage and photo quality did not improve much since ~iPhone 6. Taking decent travel photos, selfies, etc - I was happy with the results 10 years ago. Technically, I understand the difference in the technology, I just don't know who needs that vs who gets excited about new features for a brief moment.
  - jsbisviewtiful 2y ago
    > Even camera improvements are overblown. I would love to take a photo using my smartphone that doesn't look pixelated, blurry and or over-processed. Maybe asking too much considering smartphone sensors can't compete with DSLRs in some situations, but I'm always baffled with how dark and desaturated some of my photos turn out on my smartphone, as well.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - changing1999 2y ago
      Me too! If anything, iPhone photos became more over-processed over the last decade.
      - shinycode 2y ago
        I’m often surprised that my iPhone photo app show old photos in the widget that look stunning and were taken with the iPhone XS and 11 PM. Night photos are better now but day photos stalled a long time ago. I find joy taking some shots with halide or photon in trueRaw where all processing is removed and grain is present. It gives an authentic look … so all HDR stuff is often too much
octacat 2y ago
make 5 days battery life - would be real life changing innovations. AI? meeaah? what for? We already have AI for filters like for ages :)
itronitron 2y ago
If AI makes some 'thing' look easy, then that 'thing' starts to look cheap.
alexashka 2y ago
There's a fundamental tension between what customers want and what providers want. Providers want to drip feed and charge for 'improvements' indefinitely. AI is the next drip feed.
hydrogen7800 2y ago
With all the AI marketing for new phones, I keep yelling to myself "Nobody is asking for this!!" But maybe I'm in a minority group of what I consider "nobody".
mbowcut2 2y ago
Making things easier to google is IMO the least-impressive use of LLMs. I'm still waiting for a Roomba I can have a conversation with.
notpushkin 2y ago
Headsup: CNET is one of those sites playing videos (maybe relevant, maybe not) even on mobile. Be prepared to kill it if you're on metered plan (uBlock Origin can do that on Firefox for Android).
arnaudsm 2y ago
I calculated and found almost no correlation (r=0.2) between battery life and price. Which is quite sad considering it's the most important feature to consumers. Here's my write-up alongside some interesting dataviz : https://picked.arnaud.at/news/smartphone-data-science https://picked.arnaud.at/news/smartphone-data-science
FriedPickles 2y ago
Horse buyers meh on cars, care more about faster horses
Someone 2y ago
Do buyers even know what features are there because of “AI”? For example, on iOS, you can copy text out of photos (https://support.apple.com/en-ph/120004 https://support.apple.com/en-ph/120004), you can search for photos without entering key words (not that well yet, in my experience, but the results are better than no results), predictive typing apparently uses a language model, modern camera apps do zillions of things to make photos look better, etc. Neither of those are killer apps, but each does make the device a little bit better.
tstrimple 2y ago
The AI integration I'm looking for isn't to make chatgpt like queries or generate images or find one of my pictures, but to control my damn phone at a much more granular level. Settings are often getting removed or hidden or moved around to the point where controlling your device is a nightmare. Some examples of deeper configuration I'd love to see available: - "Hey siri, stop interrupting my audiobooks and music with Teams notifications." - "Could you please tone down the number of audio GPS alerts you send me? I don't need to be told five times before an exit that my exit is coming up. You're interrupting my audiobook too much." - "Why are you interrupting my audiobook again?" - "I don't know why soundless gifs keep stopping my audiobook, will you cut that shit out?" - "Please let me use this audiobook app concurrently with this other app which has all sounds muted"
sidewndr46 2y ago
This can't be right. I've been hearing about how great AI is for the past year now. It couldn't be that media outlets just report on whatever they think will generate the most revenue.
ryandrake 2y ago
AI is a technology, not a product feature. I don't care about the underlying technology in my products, I care what they do for me. As long as the feature is great, I don't care if it's made with traditional algorithms, AI, or literal magic--it doesn't matter! This idea that customers want AI is like saying that customers want applications written in Python. Why would they care what's behind the curtain?
notatoad 2y ago
The phone manufacturers have to know this, right? they've got market surveys and focus groups and internal dogfooding programs. they all know that a half-baked chatbot experience is going to sell zero phones. All this AI marketing push has got to be because they think investors are stupid, and they can fool the market into thinking they're doing an AI.
wruza 2y ago
Everyone sees through a stupid lifestyle theater instantly. Life isn’t just driving around taking filtered selfies and finding friends faces in albums. If phones didn’t suck, advanced functions would already be there without “ai”. But they lack any sensible integrations beyond the marketed scenes where clueless people are playing particular job, live and hobby moments.
Tombradley2025 2y ago
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astrodude 2y ago
This makes sense, AI is a new phenomena and most people aren't using it on their phones as much as they use SM apps, camera. Battery life is one of the major reasons why people upgrade their phone (believe it or not, many don't just replace their battery)
unsignedint 2y ago
I’m all for AI—if it actually does something useful. But features like swiping to remove unwanted items or ensuring everyone smiles in a photo don’t count. For anything genuinely useful, I’d rather subscribe to an AI service separately than pay a premium to have it locked to my phone. I want access from my PC too.
yungporko 2y ago
i think the vast majority of all people are meh on AI. i've only ever seen programmers (and grifters of course) get excited about it.
kartoshechka 2y ago
the most useful ML feature for me is text recognition on photos, helps to copy phone numbers and such

324 points by retskrad 2y ago

We’re in an era of "subscription fatigue" and smartphone makers adding another monthly fee could be a tough sell

“Turn off the local AI and let me have that extra power” . I think that’s what most people think. I certainly use AI for some tasks, but I don’t need AI everywhere 24/7 in my pocket.

brtkdotse 2y ago

Never mind AI, I just want Siri to have better text-to-speech quality than my freaking vacuum cleaner.

xp84 2y ago
Hey now, Siri’s speech-to-text quality is also worse quality than a vacuum cleaner’s too.
NotYourLawyer 2y ago
That’s AI though…
JohnMakin 2y ago
It's incredible how bad it is. It actually seems to be getting worse year by year. I nearly crashed my car on the freeway trying to set a reminder to pay a toll the other day - I changed my mind and tried to get siri to cancel the action, and no matter what I said, she kept asking "what time? what time? what time?" on endless loop, and when siri is activated on my car's dashboard, I can't see the map - forcing me to avert my attention from the road, disconnect my phone, then plug it back in and pull my map up again. She can't do or understand the most astoundingly basic stuff. I guess maybe it "feels" worse now because most LLM's are pretty good at understanding your meaning/intention, but my god, it's so bad that if I were in charge of that product I'd rip it out entirely. There's no way anyone finds any real use out of it.
- immibis 2y ago
  FWIW you were not forced to distract yourself from the road - officially, you should have got off the freeway at the next exit and parked before sorting stuff out.
  - JohnMakin 2y ago
    I mean, sure. Or this could just work how it's marketed to work. Thanks for the helpful reminder!
  - alt227 2y ago
    When something is called CarPlay and actively marketed as a way to use your phone services whilst driving, you would expect it to have a good enough UX that doesnt detract from safe driving to use it.
    - immibis 2y ago
      The law doesn't care what marketing you received and neither does physics. Don't crash your car over a radio.
      - alt227 2y ago
        I didnt, I wont, and nor did the parent post. You seem to have conjured up a scenario just to be condescending. Dont do that. CarPlay or anything else designed to use while driving should never fail to the point of distracting the driver. If it does, its broken and not fit for market. IMO in this instance, Sirri should have recognised that CarPlay was activated, that it had not got an answer it recognised multiple times in a row, and failed safe saying 'Pull over to continue' or something like that. Hiding the current navigation map and asking the same question over and over again to the point of distraction shows the system is not fit for pupose and shouldnt be used whilst driving.
- bluGill 2y ago
  Even if everything worked you should not be trying to do that while driving. Keep your attention on the road - you are in control of several tons of metal moving at deadly speeds. (don't sing a long with the radio either)
jermaustin1 2y ago
I need better speech to text. I have to repeat my text message 5+ times sometimes when sending it through carplay. I'm not talking about anything long either. A handful of words that my accent just doesn't work with. More than once per day I get fed up enough to pull over and text it.
yellow_lead 2y ago
And the vacuum cleaner really sucks
binarymax 2y ago
It’s gotta be just barely holding on in some legacy environment right now. I’m surprised they don’t just start over using new tech. Maybe that’s the end goal with on-device inference to sunset cloud Siri.
- grahamj 2y ago
  I think it’s at least partly cost reduction. Push everything to the phone so people have to pay more for phones and they pay less for infra. Win-win. Otherwise why don’t they let older devices use their server-side private LLM setup?
  - Benjaminsen 2y ago
    OpenAI whisper runs on iOS native on device, can't be just costs. https://github.com/openai/whisper/discussions/407 https://github.com/openai/whisper/discussions/407
neither_color 2y ago
I have a bunch of "premium" smart outlets(eve energy, some are "THREAD" enabled, all the bells and whistles) all named and connected to things I want to toggle with voice: a small radiator, an air purifier, a humidifier, some accent lamps, a fan, an infrared therapy lamp etc. -Before anyone asks, I ordered the European version of their energy strip for higher wattage stuff-. I give each one a clear and unambiguous name, and still, at least one in ten times Siri will be confused about what I'm asking and turn off EVERY SINGLE OUTLET IN THE ROOM. It's endlessly frustrating. For what it's worth the outlets never de-sync or disconnect like the random amazon ones do so I blame it purely on Siri.
techbrovanguard 2y ago
siri’s speech recognition and intent handling is so comically bad. as of late, for some unknown reason, when i ask siri to favourite the current song while driving it curtly replies that it doesn’t know which speaker i’m referring to. this used to work. another fun problem is siri not recognising my speech despite me not having a particularly strong accent, speaking slowly, and enunciating. i’ve gotten into the habit putting on a valley girl or bbc news anchor voice while using siri since that usually works. whoever is in charge of siri needs a reality check, the feature is borderline unusable.

mondobe 2y ago

I have a hard time seeing how this isn't obvious. 95% of everyday AI needs (for the people that even bother to interact with it) are covered by ChatGPT, and most of that is the same stuff that Google was handling before. From personal experience, the only thing that changed when replacing the "old" Google Assistant with the Gemini-powered one on my Pixel was that it's no longer able to create reminders.

JohnClark1337 2y ago
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jeffbee 2y ago
I just asked my Pixel to remind me next Tuesday to pick the bananas, and it set that in Google Tasks. Which part of this doesn't work?
- kspacewalk2 2y ago
  I've set a reminder through Gemini, then tried to change its time. Told me there are no active reminders to change. Created another reminder with correct time. Got both reminders.
  - jeffbee 2y ago
    I said "Hey Google instead of reminding me about the bananas on Tuesday, remind me on Wednesday" and that worked. It's quite possible these things only work on Android 15 QPR 1, or only on a Pixel Pro, or who knows. Its capabilities have noticeably expanded in the last few months. One thing I know it still can't do, that the old Assistant did, is control a Sonos. ETA: The joke is I don't even have Google Tasks installed, so I am not sure what effect those Tasks items would have. They might only surface on the side pane of Gmail.
  - lupire 2y ago
    Failing to set reminders/alarms is core Google technology, #2 only to PageRank itself.

tracerbulletx 2y ago

For it to have value they need to effectively apply it for something useful and have it be reliable, not just go hey we have llms. like if i could say siri share my location with my wife and text her "im on my way" oh and send her a pic of what im looking at through my sunglasses. And it worked 99% of the time, and could figure out to do it through google maps because she has android, that would be great.

chankstein38 2y ago
And, to me, none of that even sounds like AI. Just an assistant app, smart glasses, and google maps not being shit. I can't think of a reason, other than the reasons I already use ChatGPT and the AI object eraser, that I would need AI on my phone. Most of the crap they pump out is just a solution looking for a problem.
xp84 2y ago
Exactly. I remember imagining naively in 2010 that the introduction of Siri meant I would be able to just ask my phone to do simple things like update settings or manipulate the built-in apps using natural language, things chatGPT could easily do even a year ago if it had the needed API hooks. Including doing things on a schedule, compound sentences, etc. Instead we got a very brittle text adventure that can neither correctly transcribe your words, let alone understand your intention, and it’s never even changed. “Siri get me directions to McDonald’s” ‘I found this on the web for you:’ <serp for “Direct In Donald”> Or it would get directions to a McDonalds in a different state. Or say “I’m sorry, I don’t see a McDonald in your contacts.”

brianshaler 2y ago

I'd rather have flagship specs in a smaller package. The smallest in the iPhone (SE) and Pixel ("A"?) lines are still too big and tend to have previous-gen specs

dwayne_dibley 2y ago
Same boat. 'upgraded' my iphone mini to a 15 and hate it. Far far to big.
tra3 2y ago
I’ve got an appointment with Apple to replace the battery in my iPhone 13 mini. I would love the new features (especially the camera and sat comm) but I’m not willing to get a bigger form factor device.
- efficax 2y ago
  there are dozens of us! dozens!!! i’m also keeping my 13 mini until it’s dead
  - tra3 2y ago
    I’ll upgrade the second a new mini comes out…but I’m keeping it for now.
- diggan 2y ago
  > I’ve got an appointment with Apple to replace the battery in my iPhone 13 mini. I literally was in the Apple store yesterday for the same purpose (with a 12 mini). I'd also love the new features and hardware, but after trying all the available sizes in the store, they're all too big. My wife on the other hand(s), loves to have a phone she needs to hold with two hands to even be able to use, so obviously she has the Pro Max. I don't understand how people are OK with that, but to each and their own...
  - auxreturn 2y ago
    To each their own, except apple's not making new mini form-factor iphones anymore so us mini preferrers will at some point not have our own.

jeffbee 2y ago

Alternate hed: 99% of smartphone buyers have no idea which features are supported by machine inference.

voxadam 2y ago
99% of smartphone buyers have no idea what machine inference is.
- jeffbee 2y ago
  So why are we surveying them on "AI"?
  - debo_ 2y ago
    So that people can skip reading the article and just post their feelings in the HN comments.
  - recursive 2y ago
    Because "AI" is used in lots of consumer-facing marketing

mouse_ 2y ago

I would pay extra to -not- have AI in my phone. AI belongs on mainframes, out of my way when I don't want it.

xp84 2y ago
This is an underrated take. Apple, especially, wants to leverage their excellent silicon to do “AI” locally in the name of privacy purely as a marketing advantage, but the tradeoffs there are major (burning my battery instead of data center AC power, plus, my phone will never be better or faster than some big metal GPU with fans), and the privacy issue could just as well be solved by doing a good job designing the server side architecture and educating people that unlike when talking to a person, it’s trivial for a model to “not learn anything from” a conversation, and that that’s in fact automatically how it works unless you’re logging the conversations and purposely feeding them back in.
- xvector 2y ago
  You can use their cloud instead of local compute if you'd like: https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/ https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/ Building a privacy aware cloud is a lot harder than you think it is. Apple is going the whole way with remote attestation, hardware root of trust, software BOM, etc. https://security.apple.com/blog/pcc-security-research/ https://security.apple.com/blog/pcc-security-research/
  - xp84 2y ago
    They are, and I actually believe that they’ve done a good job of all that stuff (though suspect that using their weird Mac hardware in the DC can’t possibly be a truly superior option to the NVIDIA hardware the entire rest of the world is using, but let’s assume I’m wrong). But are you suggesting I will be able to flip a switch to use their cloud for all the same AI stuff instead of my battery-powered phone? That would be really welcome news! I haven’t used any of the betas so I know nothing about how “Apple Intelligence” works.
    - 2y ago

nerdjon 2y ago

My opinion is that most of the real uses of AI (like ML has always been) will be largely hidden things that are LLM based but not screaming at your face "AI". Particularly once the bubble pops and money stops being shoved into things just sticking an LLM in a pretty package with little to no value. Some of the things coming in iOS like notification summaries and similar features are big examples. It's clearly LLM based but it's not a lot of the shoving AI needlessly into things that we are seeing now and provides a true improvement given the notification overload that we have right now.

slashdave 2y ago
Photo manipulation is another example. You can see the wisdom of how Apple is approaching this. In particular, to be on device whenever possible so as not to be dependent on network bandwidth, and to tie features to new hardware (to drive sales).
- soco 2y ago
  How I wish this would actually work properly. One can have only so many sepia filters and cat ears before realizing photo manipulation still does the same it was doing ten years ago. I have yet to see an app actually improving the photo quality - and no, doubling the pixels is not that. Yes, you cannot create details where they are missing, but sometimes they should be obvious, like fixing the foliage (leaves in the distance always look like... leaves), trying to clarify the contours (not only by bumping the contrast) and I could go on. Yet no, every new AI-powered image processor only brings a new approach to sepia filters and adding cat ears.
KeytarHero 2y ago
Exactly. Ask customers "do you want AI in your phone?" and their response will probably be "meh", as shown in the article. But ask "do you want notification summaries, a better camera in low light, Siri to be able to look up more things, searchable photos, etc?" - and they absolutely will.
- effingwewt 2y ago

lopkeny12ko 2y ago

At this point I would pay a premium to have replaceable batteries again.

Syonyk 2y ago
My Sonim XP3+ has a hard shell replaceable battery and lasts a week and a half on a charge. It's not even a very expensive device, it's under $150! ;) But it is a flip phone running Android Go with no apps... That said, I think the tradeoffs being made right now are probably the right ones. Apple's latest devices have gone to an electrically released sort of adhesive (versus the older pull-strip removeable adhesive, which is a big step up from the "glue it in" approach many vendors take), and for a given volume, you get more battery if you can rely on the phone to protect it from damage - which is why almost everything with an internal battery uses some variety of pouch cell. They're quite a bit more fragile than the hard-cased batteries, but you get a lot more battery in the volume than you do with the hard cased ones. As long as it's not incredibly irritating to replace the battery, I'm fine optimizing the daily use thing (battery life in a given phone size) over the once-every-few-years thing (replacing the battery).
- ghaff 2y ago
  Getting someone to replace a battery every 4 or 5 years really isn’t onerous. And for iPhones the magnetic batteries that attach to the back are a pretty effective way to stretch battery life a bunch more hours if you need to.
jollyllama 2y ago
Field-swappable is a must

ipsum2 2y ago

People think of chatGPT now when they hear AI, but for on-device its more like speech recognition, image keyword search, and keyboard next word prediction.

deleted 2y ago
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Syonyk 2y ago

> The biggest motivation for US adult smartphone owners to upgrade their devices is longer battery life (61%)... Battery replacements are a thing. They're apparently not a common thing, unfortunately, because that might impact new phone sales... and even on devices where it's trivial, people don't seem to do it. A decade ago or so I was doing a lot of Nexus 5 battery swaps for people because one of the battery OEMs was shipping junk and the batteries were shot in a year. I really wish OEMs would put bigger batteries in phones. It improves everything. Not only do you get longer initial battery life, you can handle far more "battery aging" before things stop working right. You still have a day's battery life (which I expect is what most people actually mean - they want their phone to last the day without thinking about it) even with capacity loss, and a larger battery can have more internal resistance increase (another factor of battery aging) before it sags too badly under the load to keep voltage up. Based on the fact that easily 90+% of phones I see in the wild have cases on them, physical size and thickness isn't a big factor (and those newer folding screen devices are massive when folded). Another few mm doesn't matter when phones live in purses, men's pockets, or jackets. ... or just go back to a modern flip phone sort of device, get a week and a half battery life, and stop worrying about remembering to charge your phone. ;)

Sohcahtoa82 2y ago
> Based on the fact that easily 90+% of phones I see in the wild have cases on them, physical size and thickness isn't a big factor Everyone says this, but I wonder if the sales data says otherwise, because device manufacturers, especially Apple, REALLY love to advertise how thin their devices are. Personally, I don't want a super thin device because I feel like the slightest bending force is going to snap it in half. It's absolutely wild to me that people will store their phones in their back pocket.
- Syonyk 2y ago
  Apple's mobile division still seems to struggle with the ghost of Jony Ive. At least their laptop division was willing to rethink things with the Apple Silicon transition and go back to things that worked. The late Intel-era portable Macs were simply broken, because of Ive's apparent obsession with "thin for thin's sake." Or, more probably, "thin for the sake of industrial design awards." They innovated 20% too much on keyboard design with the butterfly keyboard that was simply a bad design. I don't know what else to call a keyboard that reliably breaks after a few years of service. But, bad though that it is, it was even worse because you couldn't replace the keyboard. You had to replace the whole top case and battery, at something like $700, when one key went bad, because the whole thing was integrated to save a mm or two. Not only did they un-solve a solved problem (reliable laptop keyboards), they even un-solved the ability to replace a keyboard when it gets mangled, or something spills in it, or a random failure happens. But, worse, they went with the USB-C only design (the thinnest port!), meaning that every owner of one of those laptops I knew had a pile of assorted adapters in their bag so they could do things that most people want to do every now and then with a laptop, like drive an external display for a presentation, read a USB-A storage device, or read a micro SD card. Yes, the laptop was thinner, but at the cost of needing to carry extra stuff with you to work around the lack of ports. And then, because it was so thin, they didn't have space to properly cool the zorching-fast Intel chips they put in them, and the chips would throttle badly while baking the machine. The M-series laptops, shocking me incredibly, threw all that "design" out the window, and went back to something actually useful. They cool well (admittedly, that's mostly the Apple Silicon barely needing cooling), they fixed the keyboard, and the machines have a useful set of ports on the side for "common tasks with a laptop" (SD, HDMI, headphone, plus the USB-C/Thunderbolt ports - still no A ports, though). And then enough battery to last just about forever. Anyway, I hope their phone division works this sort of thing out too.

behnamoh 2y ago

I've been trying the iOS Beta 18.2 and here's my impression of Apple Intelligence: It's not bad, it's really really bad. The image clean-up feature is utterly useless, and I think it's one of the areas where we can clearly see the difference between a company for whom Generative AI is an afterthought (Apple), and the competition. I paid $1500 for the new iPhone Pro Max and a great part of the deal was the Apple Intelligence support, but frankly, I might as well switch to Android at this point because I'm really disappointed at Apple's take on AI. I'll probably wait until the official Apple Intelligence is introduced but tbh I don't think there will be much improvements over this version. And as for Siri: It's as stupid as it ever was. I ask it to convert something from lbs to kg and it responds "there's no music playing". If anything, its natural language comprehension has degraded. Currently, there's no context awareness, so I still can't ask Siri "how do I respond to this email?". Really, the only thing that "works" is the ChatGPT feature that describes an image you send it. Anything Apple-related is bonkers. It's really embarrassing.

xvector 2y ago
Apple has always sucked in AI and they have never formed the culture necessary to enable and attract top ML talent. They developed Siri years ago and have stagnated since. As far as the future of compute goes, Meta seems like it has a much more compelling argument with the Orion glasses and their investment in AI.
- behnamoh 2y ago
  > Apple has always sucked in AI Yes, but Apple fans always respond by saying "...but Apple has been using ML in much of the OS for years, you just don't see it..." I really want Apple to be better at this, but Generative AI is too uncontrollable for a control-freak company.
- fhd2 2y ago
  They didn't even develop Siri, they acquired it. Doesn't seem like they've done all that much with it beyond integrating and marketing it, but I could be wrong.

zomg 2y ago

what's a realistic use case for ai on a mobile phone? i have yet to find myself saying "gee, if only i had ai on my phone, i could do XYZ!"

diggan 2y ago
I'd love it if CarPlay/Siri just could read out stuff it finds on the Internet. Currently, all I can get out of it is "Sorry, I cannot show this to you right now" for basically everything except trying to control multimedia. At one point, I had ChatGPT working via voice in CarPlay mode (via Shortcuts I think?), but seems like Apple disabled that at one point, for some stupid reason probably.
1000100_1000101 2y ago
On iPhone, if I take a picture of a plant or animal, it identifies it for me. It's not 100% by any means, but it's useful enough. I've figured out what were baby plants I wanted vs. weeds. I've figure out species of birds I'd taken photos of with my SLR (ie: phone takes picture of Lightroom editing the image, and is able to identify it from that... I'd prefer there was a way to not require me to take a photo of my monitor, either doing it "live", and/or adding the functionality into the Mac.) For people and pets it can find other images that contain the same subject. When my daughter was studying Chinese, I could use the live-video translation app and see the lesson text translated to English, and see her hand-written answers also translated to English. I could see this being more broadly useful when travelling, along with live translation of spoken words.
- HWR_14 2y ago
  While true your examples are AI, I believe in this case AI is being used in this context to mean LLM-based AI. I don't know if LLM-based translation is better than previous translation models.
  - 1000100_1000101 2y ago
    While the AI focus these days is on LLMs, AFAICT, the NPUs and GPU accelerators are just generically fast MUL, and MAD machines with varying precisions, which should help any AI, and even non-AI tasks likes image filter kernels. Getting hardware to enable faster AI processing on phones should be good thing if used for useful tasks, LLM or not.

rcarmo 2y ago

Zero surprises here. I work with AI daily and am on the same boat.

JadeNB 2y ago

What surprises me about the story is how weak the effect is, which is stripped by the title mangler: only 25% of users report not finding AI features helpful.

lexicality 2y ago

The foldable phone thing later in the article is fun, because I actually do want a foldable phone. I'd love to have a smaller phone with a screen that gets bigger for things like watching movies while traveling. But the thing is, before buying one I borrowed one from a friend and it was absolute shit! The software hardly worked, the hinges felt horrible to open and it was still too big even when folded up. I thought I was going to break it constantly while holding it.

jonplackett 2y ago

These stats seem like the reverse of the story in the headline > A quarter of smartphone owners (25%) don't find AI features helpful, So does that mean 75% _do_ find AI Feature helpful? > 45% are reluctant to pay a monthly subscription fee for AI capabilities Are 55% happy to pay a monthly fee? >34% have privacy concerns. 66% have no privacy concerns?

galleywest200 2y ago
The graph has multiple options for some of these. 45% unwilling to pay a monthly fee, 6% willing to pay a monthly fee.
devindotcom 2y ago
This data is in the article >So does that mean 75% _do_ find AI Feature helpful? 14% find it helpful >Are 55% happy to pay a monthly fee? 6% are willing to pay >66% have no privacy concerns? no stat on this but I think we can assume based on the others that it is not split evenly because that was not the methodology
- WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
  >>66% have no privacy concerns? > no stat on this but... I think we could presume an answer - if the respondents first received a full accounting of how their phones track and record their lives, along with a full list of who is getting that data.
- jonplackett 2y ago
  Thanks. That’s clearer! Ok my next comeback - people are treating AI tools like a musical instrument. It’s like picking up a guitar for the first time, twanging a few strings and saying ‘Nah, this sounds shit’. Guitars are useless. I’d never pay for a guitar. Even chatGPT has a learning curve. I save myself hours or days per day using it for all sorts of things. Anyone who says they can’t find a use for AI is just lazy and hasn’t tried hard.
  - recursive 2y ago

jmugan 2y ago

I still can't control my iPhone with my voice in the car. Siri doesn't work well for me. Maybe there is another way I have missed, but I'm amazed this functionality is still lacking.

rishikeshs 2y ago

Why can’t they make smaller phones?

slashdave 2y ago
They can. It just that no one wants to buy them.
- rishikeshs 2y ago
  Is it so? Everyone who sees my iphone 13 mini wants it. It’s going at crazy prices in the second hand market

jdalgetty 2y ago

We'll care more about AI when it's better.

jdlyga 2y ago

GPT-4o is helpful, and so is NotebookLM. The problem is that "AI" features built into a lot of products aren't that useful.

drivingmenuts 2y ago

In re: AI on my phone - it's sort of interesting, but really not worth having because it's not smart enough nor capable of being smart enough. It lacks "judgement", which is what I really needs, instead of slavish attention to detail coupled with hallucinations.

chankstein38 2y ago

I can understand why. Most of the generative AI crap we're being force-fed these days is a solution looking for a problem. On my Samsung, the only really useful AI features they provide are erasing things in photos and upscaling. The generation is weak compared to even basic stable diffusion and otherwise they're all fluff features and sometimes give me the same vibes as the "Make Longer" feature on Notion. As far as apps go, I really don't need a chatbot in every app.

agentultra 2y ago

I actively don’t want AI, on-device or not. But with the near monopolies on these devices there isn’t a way to vote with your wallet. We’re getting whether we want it or not.

hkon 2y ago
You can have a dumb phone. If you require one for 2fa. Just have one in addition for that purpose. But you can also sms 2fa on many services
- goblinux 2y ago
  The hard part with 2FA over SMS is that it's no longer considered secure [1]. I want a dumb phone too, but with all the security tools we need (password manager, 2FA apps/tokens, encrypted messaging, etc.) it's becoming less and less an option for me. I wish there was a middle ground where I could have my phone be dumb enough to keep me from playing on it all the time, but secure enough that it makes sense for me. [1] https://www.okta.com/blog/2020/10/sms-authentication/ https://www.okta.com/blog/2020/10/sms-authentication/ I'm not affiliated with them, just the first article I found on the topic
- meindnoch 2y ago
  I don't want a dumb phone. I want a smartphone without AI crap.
- m01 2y ago
  For 2FA try a Yubikey or similar hardware U2F device. (opinion my own)

CharlieDigital 2y ago

I think the mistake a lot of companies are making with their approach to AI is making AI some "other" interface that you have to interact with explicitly. This chat bot approach is only one paradigm for using AI and it's probably the worst one in most use cases. Amazon Rufus, for example, falls into this category and it's hard to even remember to engage with it. On the other hand, Amazon is happy to serve me absolute trash search results. What most people probably want is an AI that can, for example, help organize their calendar transparently. Have a meeting coming up with a client? What if the AI can use tools to go find the latest info about the client? Check their LinkedIn, check their X, check their blog, research their company, give you a tear sheet on topics to discuss based on this in the calendar notes. If a user has to directly interact and instruct the AI, it feels like it defeats the purpose.

aithrowawaycomm 2y ago

It has been especially frustrating to read about Apple Intelligence on my 2022 iPhone with iOS Safari, where some JavaScript bugs that have been around since 2012 seem to be slightly worse in the latest update, and occasionally the entire app just freezes for no good reason, even if I've closed all other tabs. Not to mention how often I have to reset my entire 2021 iPad because the audio drivers get into a bad state. I suppose "stability improvements in WebKit" doesn't do much for Apple's stock price compared to SiriGPT. But this is feeling like death-by-1000-cuts: I don't think users are deeply committed to Apple UX/etc. I believe Apple's US market dominance is largely due to burnt fingers around Android's unreliability and annoyances between 2010-2020 (e.g. Google and Samsung not playing nice, badly orchestrated version changes). This was never a permanent state of affairs; Android has stabilized significantly and is more harmonized among competing manufacturers, while retaining its advantages on price and ease of development. Apple seems complacent on the basics, and is overextending into an AI product few users seem to want.

FireSquid2006 2y ago

Man I really just want email, texting, and a web browser on my phone. More "stuff" to do is an anti feature for me.

hollandheese 2y ago
Maybe Apple actually had it right with the first iPhone. No apps, just e-mail, texting and a good web browser.
akho 2y ago
I want maps, a taxi/bike rental app, banking, notes, a camera, a music player, tickets for stuff, and a TOTP gizmo. You’ll say I can do most of that in a browser, but then you’ve just moved complexity around.

ricardobeat 2y ago

A bit of a chicken and egg problem, isn’t it? Since really useful AI feature’s don’t really exist yet, why would one expect the general public to want it? Check again in six months.

aiono 2y ago

AI companies are desperately trying to find actual use cases but it seems like there is not that much to justify current investment.

amateuring 2y ago
bingo
Nicholas_C 2y ago
Sounds a little like crypto although there are actual use cases for AI. Just not as many as investors think.
- changing1999 2y ago
  It's very similar in regards to treating the increase in compute power consumption as a signal of "growth".
- marcosdumay 2y ago
  There are lots and lots of use cases for good AI. Those LLMs we have around just aren't that.
  - chairmansteve 2y ago
    Like VR. Lots of niche uses will emerge. But not much main stream adoption.
bobro 2y ago
It’s been enough time now that we should really have a handful of very clear use cases, but we just don’t.
GuB-42 2y ago
Here, it is more like the smartphone market is stagnating and manufacturers need something to encourage people to buy new smartphones instead of keeping the one they already have. They are already doing planned obsolescence, with hard to replace batteries, limited software support combined with closed systems, etc... But they can't abuse it, as regulatory agencies are already after them and customers are starting to notice. They had a go with cameras, as it is a significant differentiator, but nowadays, most smartphone cameras are as good as they can be for what they are used for. And it turns out that AI is the big hype right now, so of course, they are using as a selling point. The funny part is that "AI" (machine learning techniques) have been running in smartphones for a while (I'd say a decade), hidden in camera software. How do you think these tiny cameras can do pictures that look so good? But they mostly kept quiet about it, as it had implications of making "fakes". And yeah, stuff like Siri that works mostly on servers, you don't need a phone with "AI capabilities" for that, just internet access, but they are certainly going to put in in their ads.

AdamN 2y ago

AI is a means to an end - it's the end that people want (or don't want). For example people like fast and accurate spell check - they don't care whether AI did it or not.

pjmlp 2y ago

Of course, they are gimmicks to attempt to sell new phones, now that the market has stagnated, many folks even have two or more phones, and hardly need fancy features.

brailsafe 2y ago

Maybe it's just me, but I'd prefer to spend less of my life on my phone in general. Seems like first-party integration of AI features is just a ploy to persuade me to use it more, since the appeal of novel apps or software features has long since died out.

racl101 2y ago

I could not care less about AI on my phone. I don't want to learn to use it nor do I want to give it free reign over my content. If I can disable it on any smartphone I own I will. Of course, aside from checking email and calendar I don't do a lot of work from my phone.

deleted 2y ago

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varispeed 2y ago

Every time a company shoves AI into their product I see the won't eat cereal meme.

6gvONxR4sf7o 2y ago

The only AI thing that excites me on my phone is a battery-friendly way for app developers to run ML models. I don't want an AI assistant that sees everything that i do, but some things like computer vision and translation and OCR are handy to have a super efficient coprocessor for, and I could see interesting apps using ML increasingly. But that's kind of a second order thing. I'm sure apple and them are also trying to figure out how to also let app devs use their strongest foundation models too without every app wanting to download 100GB of weights.

Closi 2y ago

It's because current AI is meh on a phone. Once someone manages to combine Siri's phone integration + ChatGPT Voice mode and it runs locally I will be very interested. Until then, I'm a bit meh on it.

rsynnott 2y ago

Today in incredibly obvious things... Smartphones are an absolute graveyard of fads; remember the 3D screen phones, the phones with projectors, and so forth? They generally go nowhere. I suspect 'AI' on phones will be similar. Overwhelmingly, what people want out of phones is "like my current phone, but with better battery life and maybe a better camera." Previously 'faster' was also a concern, but modern phones are largely Good Enough.

changing1999 2y ago
Even camera improvements are overblown. My usage and photo quality did not improve much since ~iPhone 6. Taking decent travel photos, selfies, etc - I was happy with the results 10 years ago. Technically, I understand the difference in the technology, I just don't know who needs that vs who gets excited about new features for a brief moment.
- jsbisviewtiful 2y ago
  > Even camera improvements are overblown. I would love to take a photo using my smartphone that doesn't look pixelated, blurry and or over-processed. Maybe asking too much considering smartphone sensors can't compete with DSLRs in some situations, but I'm always baffled with how dark and desaturated some of my photos turn out on my smartphone, as well.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - changing1999 2y ago
    Me too! If anything, iPhone photos became more over-processed over the last decade.
    - shinycode 2y ago
      I’m often surprised that my iPhone photo app show old photos in the widget that look stunning and were taken with the iPhone XS and 11 PM. Night photos are better now but day photos stalled a long time ago. I find joy taking some shots with halide or photon in trueRaw where all processing is removed and grain is present. It gives an authentic look … so all HDR stuff is often too much

octacat 2y ago

make 5 days battery life - would be real life changing innovations. AI? meeaah? what for? We already have AI for filters like for ages :)

itronitron 2y ago

If AI makes some 'thing' look easy, then that 'thing' starts to look cheap.

alexashka 2y ago

There's a fundamental tension between what customers want and what providers want. Providers want to drip feed and charge for 'improvements' indefinitely. AI is the next drip feed.

hydrogen7800 2y ago

With all the AI marketing for new phones, I keep yelling to myself "Nobody is asking for this!!" But maybe I'm in a minority group of what I consider "nobody".

mbowcut2 2y ago

Making things easier to google is IMO the least-impressive use of LLMs. I'm still waiting for a Roomba I can have a conversation with.

notpushkin 2y ago

Headsup: CNET is one of those sites playing videos (maybe relevant, maybe not) even on mobile. Be prepared to kill it if you're on metered plan (uBlock Origin can do that on Firefox for Android).

arnaudsm 2y ago

I calculated and found almost no correlation (r=0.2) between battery life and price. Which is quite sad considering it's the most important feature to consumers. Here's my write-up alongside some interesting dataviz : https://picked.arnaud.at/news/smartphone-data-science https://picked.arnaud.at/news/smartphone-data-science

FriedPickles 2y ago

Horse buyers meh on cars, care more about faster horses

Someone 2y ago

Do buyers even know what features are there because of “AI”? For example, on iOS, you can copy text out of photos (https://support.apple.com/en-ph/120004 https://support.apple.com/en-ph/120004), you can search for photos without entering key words (not that well yet, in my experience, but the results are better than no results), predictive typing apparently uses a language model, modern camera apps do zillions of things to make photos look better, etc. Neither of those are killer apps, but each does make the device a little bit better.

tstrimple 2y ago

The AI integration I'm looking for isn't to make chatgpt like queries or generate images or find one of my pictures, but to control my damn phone at a much more granular level. Settings are often getting removed or hidden or moved around to the point where controlling your device is a nightmare. Some examples of deeper configuration I'd love to see available: - "Hey siri, stop interrupting my audiobooks and music with Teams notifications." - "Could you please tone down the number of audio GPS alerts you send me? I don't need to be told five times before an exit that my exit is coming up. You're interrupting my audiobook too much." - "Why are you interrupting my audiobook again?" - "I don't know why soundless gifs keep stopping my audiobook, will you cut that shit out?" - "Please let me use this audiobook app concurrently with this other app which has all sounds muted"

sidewndr46 2y ago

This can't be right. I've been hearing about how great AI is for the past year now. It couldn't be that media outlets just report on whatever they think will generate the most revenue.

ryandrake 2y ago

AI is a technology, not a product feature. I don't care about the underlying technology in my products, I care what they do for me. As long as the feature is great, I don't care if it's made with traditional algorithms, AI, or literal magic--it doesn't matter! This idea that customers want AI is like saying that customers want applications written in Python. Why would they care what's behind the curtain?

notatoad 2y ago

The phone manufacturers have to know this, right? they've got market surveys and focus groups and internal dogfooding programs. they all know that a half-baked chatbot experience is going to sell zero phones. All this AI marketing push has got to be because they think investors are stupid, and they can fool the market into thinking they're doing an AI.

wruza 2y ago

Everyone sees through a stupid lifestyle theater instantly. Life isn’t just driving around taking filtered selfies and finding friends faces in albums. If phones didn’t suck, advanced functions would already be there without “ai”. But they lack any sensible integrations beyond the marketed scenes where clueless people are playing particular job, live and hobby moments.

Tombradley2025 2y ago

[dead]

astrodude 2y ago

This makes sense, AI is a new phenomena and most people aren't using it on their phones as much as they use SM apps, camera. Battery life is one of the major reasons why people upgrade their phone (believe it or not, many don't just replace their battery)

unsignedint 2y ago

I’m all for AI—if it actually does something useful. But features like swiping to remove unwanted items or ensuring everyone smiles in a photo don’t count. For anything genuinely useful, I’d rather subscribe to an AI service separately than pay a premium to have it locked to my phone. I want access from my PC too.

yungporko 2y ago

i think the vast majority of all people are meh on AI. i've only ever seen programmers (and grifters of course) get excited about it.

kartoshechka 2y ago

the most useful ML feature for me is text recognition on photos, helps to copy phone numbers and such