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The comments on this article are very interesting. The next major device will definitely be AI-first. Apple is currently trying to jerry-rig AI into their exist

The comments on this article are very interesting. The next major device will definitely be AI-first. Apple is currently trying to jerry-rig AI into their existing product, the iPhone. This has so far not only been a complete failure, but is bound to be a complete failure in the end. The next Apple will be the one that creates an AI-first device entirely from scratch. AI lies at the core of everything it does. It's an AI assistant, a friend, another brain. It's not some BS summarizing engine that can't even do simple tasks like copy the name of a song playing on Spotify into Notes. That's what I think Jony Ive envisions.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
fidotron 1y ago
> The next major device will definitely be AI-first. Be more specific though: what form factor will such a device be in? A coffee maker? A phone? Glasses? Cars? A building? The AI wave seems to be hoping a whole load of hardware revolutions, such as holographic displays, will just appear out of the ether because it fits with their vision of how things should be.
- zachthewf 1y ago
  Probably glasses or airpods.
  - qgin 1y ago
    If Apple has an opening for an AI-first device, its AirPods with their own Apple Watch style SIP and data connection + replacing Siri with a real multimodal model.
- neuralkoi 1y ago
  I don't know! But Sam Altman seems to think Jony Ive does. If I did, I would be getting $6.5 billion in stock from OpenAI!
- yunwal 1y ago
  I don’t see why the device has to be in a significantly different form factor than current phones. AI alleviates one of the major problems phones have right now, which is that typing on them is slow. If you can type a half-assed message, and have AI fill in the blanks, or reliably transcribe your voice, that’s a huge improvement to the phone in its current form factor. No reason the screen or interfaces have to undergo a radical transformation
  - fidotron 1y ago
    If it's a phone it will have to run Android, with the Play Store to get the apps, at which point it will be very dependent on Google. You aren't going to get people giving up their mobile banking apps to carry an AI phone that doesn't quite work, hence the need for it to be something else.
  - albumen 1y ago
    I agree. Humane tried with a new form factor. An audio-only interface is too limited. A watch screen is too small. There's a lot going for a decently sized screen that lets you look images, maps, emails, webpages that you control (rather than projecting onto the nearest (in)convenient surface), that fits in your pocket. Good enough BCIs are still years/decades away. I could imagine AirPods that connect to various screens embedded in the environment, which you temporarily use when next to them. But it's still jot as convenient as a screen in your pocket.
  - JKCalhoun 1y ago
    But in fact it could be a watch if you more or less talk-to/listen-to it.
    - yunwal 1y ago
      But then you can’t see photos/videos. I doubt openAI is going for a niche device here
- 999900000999 1y ago
  It's going to be an entire OS. This would cost 50 billion or so. But right now you probably interact with at least 3 or 4 oses per day. Your TV, has one. Your phone has one, your laptop has one. And if you have voice assistants, they run a 4th distinct OS. The future will have one OS that shares a session. Two paths exist. 1. This runs primarily locally aside from a very small amount of data to share the session ( which you can disable). It's completely open source and modifiable. If you want to roll a 3500$ super PC it'll be just as compatible with the OS as a 200$ one. Writing small automated tasks, everything from just asking with a voice command to wake up jazz,to running a custom C script, will be easy to do. While I'm dreaming I want a new programming language which supports 3 levels. Plan English instructions ran though an LLM, something like Python and a systems level language like Rust. All "native" programs will be built in this framework. Now, the negative path is this is all closed source, processed in some data center. "John, I noticed you said to Brian your feet hurt, new running shoes are 30% off , just say the word." This is the far far more likely outcome. They're going to build an AI that's constantly with you, integrated in every device you own, and it'll all be to sell you stuff. "Waymo, I would like to go home." "Sure, but let's stop for milkshakes." "Waymo, please , I'm tried." "Understood, I've arranged the milkshakes to be dropped off an your apartment." This technology could be amazing for accessibility, even real time sign language translation would change the world. We'll get some of that, but the end goal will always be making as much money as possible. Ultimately selling us crap. Your awake for 16 hours today. You must be monetized every waking second. Once they figure out how to get the science from Dream Scenario to work I'm sure they monetize sleep too
lolinder 1y ago
The reason why Apple has failed to integrate AI successfully into the iPhone isn't because we need an AI-first device, it's because AI is still universally being strategized as a solution in search of a problem. An AI-first device at this stage will fail for the same reason: it doesn't have a mission statement to solve particular problems for real people, it has a mission statement to be an AI device. The absolute best case scenario for an AI-first device at this stage is that it ends up like the Vision Pro, which had a similar mission problem.
- echelon 1y ago
  No. The AI pane of glass is the next killer product. The next major device won't be an ad funnel though. It'll give users first class access to the whole pane of glass. Not a managed ads experience at the will of some monopoly platform, but something where the AI serves us instead of being extractive. The minute we have a broker or agent between us and the "user is the product" services that try to advertise to us and steal our time, it's game over for the old model of revenue. Google, ads, all of it will vanish. There won't be any more selling to me or the rest of the world ever again. You'll have to pay us to get our eyeballs. Let me clarify: if we have a pane of glass where we run our own agent with our own best interests in mind, then nobody can get through that layer without it being permitted by us. No more ads. No more stealthy product placement. No more paid or featured listings. It goes further. No more rage bait, attention bait, low information filler. The annoying people in life and in social media disappear to the great filter. AI agents can clean up the shitty place the Internet has become. AI agents are personal butlers. Or internet condoms. The way that works is this: on-device AI that can handle the task of routing and dispatching and filtering, which can then dispatch out to expensive cloud AI that would otherwise try to inject adds into the stream.
  - cj 1y ago
    1) AI pane of glass 2) It runs your own agent 3) It has your best interest in mind 4) It's a broker between you and the "wild wild west internet" That's cool, but is it "iPhone killer" cool? Maybe, but still unclear why. What's the mission statement of the device, to the OP's original point? It runs an agent, who cares? Is the mission statement for this device basically "Use the internet without ads" -- if so, that's a pretty narrow market. People have learned to tolerate ads, I don't think people will throw away their iPhones for a better ad blocker.
adamrezich 1y ago
> The next Apple will be the one that creates an AI-first device entirely from scratch. When's the last time something of this magnitude actually occurred in real life? Myself and many of the other commenters you refer to have a hard time believing something like this is even possible in the current market—the huge megacorps are more risk-averse and incapable of innovation than ever before, and the scrappy startups seem to exist entirely to be acquired by the megacorps to raise their valuations. The last time something even remotely like this happened was, what, the Oculus Rift? And that was far from a perfect product that perfectly solved every problem in the domain perfectly on the first try.
jcims 1y ago
This is where SesameAI seems to be heading. If you haven't yet, try the demo, it's definitely flawed at the moment but shows some potential for conversational UX.
spike021 1y ago
Hasn’t that already been done (and failed) with one or two devices? there was one about a year ago that was effectively a clip on your shirt and it seemed like a terrible product. It was meant to be a dedicated AI device.
- thrance 1y ago
  There's also the Rabbit R1, which was a laughably bad scam.
KaoruAoiShiho 1y ago
iPhone should've been a successful formfactor, it's not the form factor that's the problem it's the lack of apple datacenters that can train and inference for a popular service. Instead Apple went all in on edge inference which as we all know is absolutely stupid and probably will never be that relevant.
arbuge 1y ago
This could be true... but only if there is an actual specific problem that they can put their finger on that requires the device to be AI-first. What is that problem exactly? It's also not obvious to me that a concerted effort by Apple (unlike what we've seen so far, admittedly) wouldn't eventually be successful in converting the iPhone to something effectively indistinguishable from a platform designed from the ground up to be "AI-first". Designing things from the ground up is hard by the way. It's not just the design itself; it's the ecosystems around them which are really hard to get going. Apple has the world's biggest flywheel in motion there already.
bilsbie 1y ago
I think it should make interfaces on the fly depending on what you want to do.
singularity2001 1y ago
The next major device will be AI first but not voice in voice out, but rather voice in text out (and images). I'm not sure they understand this and I'm not sure they could deliver anything which would surpass the iPhone.
tim333 1y ago
Taking sci-fi as a guide I think it should be robots.
klabb3 1y ago
> The next major device will definitely be AI-first. Everything so far that has been named X First has been marketing woo woo, and in practice only meant "we're thinking about this use case a little more than before". Such as mobile-first, and cloud-first. In either case, sure, it's very possible that device hardware will change. But in what way is hard to say. Will the on-device chips be more powerful to support local inference? Sure. > Apple is currently trying to jerry-rig AI into their existing product, the iPhone [...] is bound to be a complete failure in the end. Yes, kind of. The problem with all existing platforms including web is that they're build in a way that is adversarial to interop. Apps are siloed, and the only possible birds-eyed view is the OS itself. But, GUIs are not built for machine interop. Vision models to navigate UI will be flaky at best for the foreseeable future (and forget about voice, it's an extra modality at best and is way too limited). On web frontend, it's the same story. On backend, the web has been adversarial for a long time, with fingerprinting, rate limiting, anti-scraping, paywalling etc, which has been supercharged in the last year or two. Essentially, the products and systems we use every day are a poor fit for interop with AI, so I suspect we'll see two parallel futures: (1) interop and semantic GUIs being integrated into platforms, web and app ecosystems (this is what MCP is IIUC). This will fail for the same reasons as web 2.0 failed (the adversarial nature of tech business models - opening up APIs is not incentivized), not to mention the investment required to build a new OS and (2) vision models to do tasks on behalf of humans with some mediocre agent-loop-thing on top of existing hot garbage pool of already flaky apps and sites. This won't necessarily fail, but it will mean platform- and large data owners (Google, MS etc) will yet again end up on top, since they control the access to the birds-eye view (much like Siri or Google Assistant). It is also the most noisy, flaky and data-intensive surface area to use for interop, meaning the products will be slow, bloated and feel like bonzibuddy for years. Doesn't mean AI won't transform businesses and white-collar work. It certainly already does. But, the AI selling point for consumers (current ability - not "future potential"), is kind of like how Google Search and Maps was a decade+ ago. Sure, it provides amazing utility, but most of the time you're looking at memes, playing games and watching TV shows. AI in those products is mostly a continuation of ongoing enshittification.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

fidotron 1y ago

> The next major device will definitely be AI-first. Be more specific though: what form factor will such a device be in? A coffee maker? A phone? Glasses? Cars? A building? The AI wave seems to be hoping a whole load of hardware revolutions, such as holographic displays, will just appear out of the ether because it fits with their vision of how things should be.

zachthewf 1y ago
Probably glasses or airpods.
- qgin 1y ago
  If Apple has an opening for an AI-first device, its AirPods with their own Apple Watch style SIP and data connection + replacing Siri with a real multimodal model.
neuralkoi 1y ago
I don't know! But Sam Altman seems to think Jony Ive does. If I did, I would be getting $6.5 billion in stock from OpenAI!
yunwal 1y ago
I don’t see why the device has to be in a significantly different form factor than current phones. AI alleviates one of the major problems phones have right now, which is that typing on them is slow. If you can type a half-assed message, and have AI fill in the blanks, or reliably transcribe your voice, that’s a huge improvement to the phone in its current form factor. No reason the screen or interfaces have to undergo a radical transformation
- fidotron 1y ago
  If it's a phone it will have to run Android, with the Play Store to get the apps, at which point it will be very dependent on Google. You aren't going to get people giving up their mobile banking apps to carry an AI phone that doesn't quite work, hence the need for it to be something else.
- albumen 1y ago
  I agree. Humane tried with a new form factor. An audio-only interface is too limited. A watch screen is too small. There's a lot going for a decently sized screen that lets you look images, maps, emails, webpages that you control (rather than projecting onto the nearest (in)convenient surface), that fits in your pocket. Good enough BCIs are still years/decades away. I could imagine AirPods that connect to various screens embedded in the environment, which you temporarily use when next to them. But it's still jot as convenient as a screen in your pocket.
- JKCalhoun 1y ago
  But in fact it could be a watch if you more or less talk-to/listen-to it.
  - yunwal 1y ago
    But then you can’t see photos/videos. I doubt openAI is going for a niche device here
999900000999 1y ago
It's going to be an entire OS. This would cost 50 billion or so. But right now you probably interact with at least 3 or 4 oses per day. Your TV, has one. Your phone has one, your laptop has one. And if you have voice assistants, they run a 4th distinct OS. The future will have one OS that shares a session. Two paths exist. 1. This runs primarily locally aside from a very small amount of data to share the session ( which you can disable). It's completely open source and modifiable. If you want to roll a 3500$ super PC it'll be just as compatible with the OS as a 200$ one. Writing small automated tasks, everything from just asking with a voice command to wake up jazz,to running a custom C script, will be easy to do. While I'm dreaming I want a new programming language which supports 3 levels. Plan English instructions ran though an LLM, something like Python and a systems level language like Rust. All "native" programs will be built in this framework. Now, the negative path is this is all closed source, processed in some data center. "John, I noticed you said to Brian your feet hurt, new running shoes are 30% off , just say the word." This is the far far more likely outcome. They're going to build an AI that's constantly with you, integrated in every device you own, and it'll all be to sell you stuff. "Waymo, I would like to go home." "Sure, but let's stop for milkshakes." "Waymo, please , I'm tried." "Understood, I've arranged the milkshakes to be dropped off an your apartment." This technology could be amazing for accessibility, even real time sign language translation would change the world. We'll get some of that, but the end goal will always be making as much money as possible. Ultimately selling us crap. Your awake for 16 hours today. You must be monetized every waking second. Once they figure out how to get the science from Dream Scenario to work I'm sure they monetize sleep too

lolinder 1y ago

The reason why Apple has failed to integrate AI successfully into the iPhone isn't because we need an AI-first device, it's because AI is still universally being strategized as a solution in search of a problem. An AI-first device at this stage will fail for the same reason: it doesn't have a mission statement to solve particular problems for real people, it has a mission statement to be an AI device. The absolute best case scenario for an AI-first device at this stage is that it ends up like the Vision Pro, which had a similar mission problem.

echelon 1y ago
No. The AI pane of glass is the next killer product. The next major device won't be an ad funnel though. It'll give users first class access to the whole pane of glass. Not a managed ads experience at the will of some monopoly platform, but something where the AI serves us instead of being extractive. The minute we have a broker or agent between us and the "user is the product" services that try to advertise to us and steal our time, it's game over for the old model of revenue. Google, ads, all of it will vanish. There won't be any more selling to me or the rest of the world ever again. You'll have to pay us to get our eyeballs. Let me clarify: if we have a pane of glass where we run our own agent with our own best interests in mind, then nobody can get through that layer without it being permitted by us. No more ads. No more stealthy product placement. No more paid or featured listings. It goes further. No more rage bait, attention bait, low information filler. The annoying people in life and in social media disappear to the great filter. AI agents can clean up the shitty place the Internet has become. AI agents are personal butlers. Or internet condoms. The way that works is this: on-device AI that can handle the task of routing and dispatching and filtering, which can then dispatch out to expensive cloud AI that would otherwise try to inject adds into the stream.
- cj 1y ago
  1) AI pane of glass 2) It runs your own agent 3) It has your best interest in mind 4) It's a broker between you and the "wild wild west internet" That's cool, but is it "iPhone killer" cool? Maybe, but still unclear why. What's the mission statement of the device, to the OP's original point? It runs an agent, who cares? Is the mission statement for this device basically "Use the internet without ads" -- if so, that's a pretty narrow market. People have learned to tolerate ads, I don't think people will throw away their iPhones for a better ad blocker.

adamrezich 1y ago

> The next Apple will be the one that creates an AI-first device entirely from scratch. When's the last time something of this magnitude actually occurred in real life? Myself and many of the other commenters you refer to have a hard time believing something like this is even possible in the current market—the huge megacorps are more risk-averse and incapable of innovation than ever before, and the scrappy startups seem to exist entirely to be acquired by the megacorps to raise their valuations. The last time something even remotely like this happened was, what, the Oculus Rift? And that was far from a perfect product that perfectly solved every problem in the domain perfectly on the first try.

jcims 1y ago

This is where SesameAI seems to be heading. If you haven't yet, try the demo, it's definitely flawed at the moment but shows some potential for conversational UX.

spike021 1y ago

Hasn’t that already been done (and failed) with one or two devices? there was one about a year ago that was effectively a clip on your shirt and it seemed like a terrible product. It was meant to be a dedicated AI device.

thrance 1y ago
There's also the Rabbit R1, which was a laughably bad scam.

KaoruAoiShiho 1y ago

iPhone should've been a successful formfactor, it's not the form factor that's the problem it's the lack of apple datacenters that can train and inference for a popular service. Instead Apple went all in on edge inference which as we all know is absolutely stupid and probably will never be that relevant.

arbuge 1y ago

This could be true... but only if there is an actual specific problem that they can put their finger on that requires the device to be AI-first. What is that problem exactly? It's also not obvious to me that a concerted effort by Apple (unlike what we've seen so far, admittedly) wouldn't eventually be successful in converting the iPhone to something effectively indistinguishable from a platform designed from the ground up to be "AI-first". Designing things from the ground up is hard by the way. It's not just the design itself; it's the ecosystems around them which are really hard to get going. Apple has the world's biggest flywheel in motion there already.

bilsbie 1y ago

I think it should make interfaces on the fly depending on what you want to do.

singularity2001 1y ago

The next major device will be AI first but not voice in voice out, but rather voice in text out (and images). I'm not sure they understand this and I'm not sure they could deliver anything which would surpass the iPhone.

tim333 1y ago

Taking sci-fi as a guide I think it should be robots.

klabb3 1y ago

> The next major device will definitely be AI-first. Everything so far that has been named X First has been marketing woo woo, and in practice only meant "we're thinking about this use case a little more than before". Such as mobile-first, and cloud-first. In either case, sure, it's very possible that device hardware will change. But in what way is hard to say. Will the on-device chips be more powerful to support local inference? Sure. > Apple is currently trying to jerry-rig AI into their existing product, the iPhone [...] is bound to be a complete failure in the end. Yes, kind of. The problem with all existing platforms including web is that they're build in a way that is adversarial to interop. Apps are siloed, and the only possible birds-eyed view is the OS itself. But, GUIs are not built for machine interop. Vision models to navigate UI will be flaky at best for the foreseeable future (and forget about voice, it's an extra modality at best and is way too limited). On web frontend, it's the same story. On backend, the web has been adversarial for a long time, with fingerprinting, rate limiting, anti-scraping, paywalling etc, which has been supercharged in the last year or two. Essentially, the products and systems we use every day are a poor fit for interop with AI, so I suspect we'll see two parallel futures: (1) interop and semantic GUIs being integrated into platforms, web and app ecosystems (this is what MCP is IIUC). This will fail for the same reasons as web 2.0 failed (the adversarial nature of tech business models - opening up APIs is not incentivized), not to mention the investment required to build a new OS and (2) vision models to do tasks on behalf of humans with some mediocre agent-loop-thing on top of existing hot garbage pool of already flaky apps and sites. This won't necessarily fail, but it will mean platform- and large data owners (Google, MS etc) will yet again end up on top, since they control the access to the birds-eye view (much like Siri or Google Assistant). It is also the most noisy, flaky and data-intensive surface area to use for interop, meaning the products will be slow, bloated and feel like bonzibuddy for years. Doesn't mean AI won't transform businesses and white-collar work. It certainly already does. But, the AI selling point for consumers (current ability - not "future potential"), is kind of like how Google Search and Maps was a decade+ ago. Sure, it provides amazing utility, but most of the time you're looking at memes, playing games and watching TV shows. AI in those products is mostly a continuation of ongoing enshittification.