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
Because the execution is usually borked... I was eyeig ZenFone 9 (or something around that) and what? It was reported that it had problem with overheating and build quality.
What's more, I would love something akin to my current Galaxy a52s 5G with a display around 5.2-5.5" (I first had LG G2, then OnePlus3 which was already a bit bulky and now a52 as compromise; https://www.gsmarena.com/compare.php3?idPhone1=5543&idPhone2...)...
I do have iPhone SE (2022) and it's the size of LG G2 and I find quite handy. Something of that size but with slightly bigger screen (better screen-to-body ratio). Specs doesn't have super-hiper-premium… and the price should be sane (usually compact phones are like 20-40% higher, sic)
Did you know that factories make less big-sized and small-sized shoes than average-sized ones? Because (surprise) buyers size distribution is not uniform.
“We tried to make big shoes many times and it doesn’t sell well enough”. Oh, really. I guess I’ll just cut holes for my fingers then.
Speaking for myself, I 100% would have bought an iPhone Mini, but I purchase new phones on a 5-6 year cycle. My iPhones were the 4S and the XS.
Now that I'm ready to buy a new iPhone, the Mini has been discontinued! I think the Mini would have been and in fact was successful, but it's not successful "enough" to justify a separate model – they must have observed that people "like me" would still buy a flagship iPhone, even though we aren't 100% satisfied with the form factor.
Apple would rather have us buying a higher-margin flagship model and have an NPS of 65+ than a lower-margin mini model with an NPS of 80+.
My friend with similar instincts as me recently got a refurbished 13 Mini instead of the latest flagship. I'll probably get the flagship, because I value the satcom a little bit more than the form factor.
It’s a package of devices Apple is selling. They sell under powered smaller screen macs. They sell iMacs. They sell small iPads. They sell smaller watches. Some of these just don’t sell as well as their other offerings.
They should sell small phones. Because the whole family will be in on the brand, features, and services. I’ve heard many family members and friends say that they won’t give up their older small phones because Apple no longer makes new ones.
The idea that they don’t sell well is not a good enough reason when you are trying to capture the whole market for not just hardware but the lock in for services, apps, games, music, etc.
"Well enough" is doing a lot of work here. It's not that they aren't successful, it's that they aren't immediate, runaway hits, so the manufacturers conclude: why bother trying to build this market, let's just go back to the playbook. That's how you get mediocre products, which is where we are now.
> 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...
Good luck. I’ve tried to replace battery in mine 12 mini last week - with no success. I had to leave my phone for 4 hours or several days (if they brake screen during battery replacement, they will wait for replacement phone to be shipped overnight). Also representative was convincing me to buy a new phone - saying that battery replacement won’t help much because new ios versions has features which high battery usages, while newer iphones has larger battery and hardware optimizations for these new features. I’m thinking about iPhone 16 now while keeping iPhone 12 mini as backup phone.
I feel like many of the commenters in this thread are asking (sometimes demanding) that their devices offer a duality that can’t be met; do you want smaller phones or do you want longer battery life with more compute? At the moment, those are mutually exclusive goals. Thermodynamics can be a PITA but we’re doing (almost) the best we can.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
The only thing that changed for me was a that it couldn't control my smart Home devices anymore, nor activate navigation, nor send messages via Whatsapp (I.e. while driving).
Literally every thing I used it for got answered via "I cannot do that yet" after it randomly opted me into that. Pure garbage.
Then why are you using it? I tried using Gemini once on my Pixel 6. Couldn't play music on Youtube music on verbal instructions, I switched back to Google Assistant. Will try it again after 6 months now. :)
I'm not sure that's true. Not everybody is hounding for information from the web in the first place.
Apple's approach of using current-boom AI to help you navigate and digest your own private trove of multimedia content (photos, videos, apps, notes, structured data, etc) is absolutely useful to people as well, and for some of us, one of the only personal uses of this AI that seems compelling at all.
I'm much more excited to have help finding that goofy picture of my cat by describing what I remember, so I can share it with a friend, than I am to have some chatbot dialog about entry-level Python with a hallucinating parlor trick.
But these features have to work, and work well, and work fast, and be widely known to work, before they'll really win the market. But that's going to take a minute and it might not even happen.
>I'm much more excited to have help finding that goofy picture of my cat by describing what I remember, so I can share it with a friend, than I am to have some chatbot dialog about entry-level Python with a hallucinating parlor trick.
Hasn't Google been doing this forever? I can search random things in my photos (like pictures of an old car I owned).
Yeah, it seems based on the advertising from the various AI vendors, they are showing its use by summarizing emails/phone call/etc. Things like being able to search text messages for info blah blah. The only one I've seen pushing online searches is Google, but that seems like duh! for them to be pushing. Circle something in an image and take me to a listing of that something for sale. Of course that's Google's direction.
But that whole find me something on my mutliple gigabytes of storage on my device account definitely seems like the mass appeal
The problem is, vast majority of smartphone usage is done for entertainment and social networking purposes (IG, TikTok, Twitter, HN, gaming, Netflix and etc.). If you’re mostly scrolling and consuming, I can’t imagine how current AI tooling can help you other than some summarization of texts. Sure, for productivity cases it might be legitimate, but that’s not what supermajority of people use a phone for.
Im not sure people really know how to use an AI chat bot or understand its a more powerful, quicker and personally more fun way of getting information then just a Google search
Some personal examples of how I find it more useful (love to hear yours) and fun to use....
- Wanted to go on a hike an hour away from where both my friend (lives two hours west of me) and I live. Asked GPT what are some good hikes an hour drive away from both of us to meet & hike. With Google I have to do Many searches where GPT just provides the answer right away.
- I count calories and eat out everyday. GPT knows the calories of everything i eat as I eat at chains mostly (Cava, Panera, Starbucks, Chipolte). I tell it via voice what i just ate for my 1st meal, it calculates my calorie count and later I'll tell it what im having for my 2nd meal. It can also recall my calorie count from days ago. It does all this quickly vs. Google i'd have to do oodles of searches.
Usually Im using GPT the most when driving via voice and unlike Siri, GPT understands me and i can have whole conversations with it to get things done while driving.
I've heard horror stories and have held off so far in 'upgrading'. In the end I don't really want the fully flexible responses people are leaning into with these llm tools. All I want is to be able to give a precise instruction with my voice and have the machine reliably perform the action that it performed the last time I gave that instruction.
Since that seems to be an increasingly niche desire (at least as far as the product managers are concerned), I've been looking more and more seriously at setting up my own local voice assistant. My main barrier has been hardware—the mic arrays in the Home devices are surprisingly good and hard to beat with cheap off-the-shelf components, and you need a good mic for good STT.
It also sometimes asks to unlock my phone for commands that plain old Assistant was happy to do while locked. I haven't really found it useful at all yet, free ChatGPT is just better than free Gemini for "LLM stuff" and Google Assistant is better for "smart home stuff"
I've been thinking about trying the OpenAI integration for home assistant[1], because controlling things in my home is primarily what I use my assistant shortcut for. The normal assistant works well enough but can be frustrating if you don't remember the exact phrasing it wants to activate a certain command.
AI’s appeal depends a lot on the features. Battery is important for me (more than being anorexically thin), but I would love an AI that could screen my calls like a smart voice mail that asks questions.
Also, being able to talk to my mailbox asking questions about subjects mentioned in my e-mails would be a huge time saver.
Imagine a purely local Microsoft Recall-like thing that could answer questions about things you saw, or that read the news articles you went over quickly and answer complicated questions about them much later, at a time you just started to regret not having bookmarked it for future reading.
Computational photography uses AI a lot (next to parametric approaches), and without these algorithms, smartphone cameras would be quite shitty. People do care about that. AI isn't just LLM chatbots.
I know that's true, but I find that the images on my Pixel are starting to have a bit of an eery feel, with some of the details looking more and more like AI generated images. I'd give back a bit of the quality for more "natural" looking images.
I'm having a horrifying realization that all of my pictures are "fake" in the sense that they don't match what I saw/experienced. Maybe it's time to get back into Polaroids.
Interpretation of this on its nose suggest the algorithms are the core feature not AI, as there is no artificial intelligence involved in these processes that I’m aware of.
If you actually peak under the hood they just pass through weighted selectors, no different than a switch statement
This assumes that the capabilities and use cases are unchanged. Yes, for the AI features available today, I suppose ChatGPT can do much of it -- I wouldn't know because it's not interesting or useful to me, so I don't use it.
But: If I'm deciding whether AI features are important to me in making a decision to spend money on a future phone, it's those future AI features that I will be assessing.
95% of my everyday needs for an external intelligence (besides my own) are covered by e-mail, text, and phone calls with other humans, with a trivial portion covered by nascent AI features. As this changes, and AI gets more capable of replacing human intelligence in these interactions (TBD if this happens in the next smartphone generation, or the next human generation, or further in the future), then I will /very much/ care that the electronic device that I use most often day-to-day has access to these capabilities, and will very much use access to those capabilities as part of deciding where to spend my money.
You seriously assess "future AI features" when buying a phone? Have you heard the expression "a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush"? Also, what is the lifetime of a phone? How far in the future are these new features expected?
Apple will just tell you you need an iPhone 17 because it has a more special "you're gonna love it" neural thingy onboard, and so your purchase of a 16 is null.
> 95% of everyday AI needs (for the people that even bother to interact with it) are covered by ChatGPT
True, but it is an external service with all the privacy concerns that entails. I appreciate eg. Apple pushing local AI but at the same time I don’t think it needs to ship with the OS. Just provide an AI API apps can hook into then I can decide which models I want and where they run.
> 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
Weird! Mine can still create reminders, as well as set timers and alarms.
"Everyday AI" hasn't even been built yet tbh. Where is my assistant that notices my flight has been delayed and reschedules my appointments and lets my contacts know?
I think your example highlights why this kind of "everyday AI" would be nearly impossible. If my phone automatically rescheduled my appointments and notified my contacts, without my explicit direction, I would be pissed as all hell. There are some "confirmation" notifications that could assist here ("We noticed your flight is delayed - would you like to reschedule these appointments?"), but even then, I'd say the majority of notifications I get these days are annoying and I spend a ton of time trying to figure out how to turn off annoying notifications while not totally silencing ones I depend upon. I'd have a difficult time believing that AI systems wouldn't just add to my list of over-burdensome notifications.
I worked on a (failed) system that was supposed to help with this in the pre-ChatGPT era. The obvious limitations is getting the data, and scaling that to everyone. Learning about your flights, staying up to date on them, etc is such a daunting privacy-busting task that everyone is scared to start. Either you go use-case by use-case (flights, restaurants, calendars… etc) and never get traction or you just start scanning emails and open up huge data risks.
Today, this is nearly available, nearly. Probably only something Google/apple can realistically offer. Apple “intelligence” has started to read your notifications and rewrite them for you, so it shouldn’t be a big leap to listen for a United App notification and decide it’s urgent enough take action. Should be “trivial” for Google to do as well, and they could even run it server side to help without a phone present.
1. How does it know how/when to reschedule that doctor's appointment that you need to call to reschedule? How do you know that receptionist won't hang up on your "AI agent" who tries to call them, b/c they think it's some sort of scam bot?
2. How does it know which contacts to contact? Does that acquaintance you talked to for some professional reason need to know your flight got rescheduled? What about that travel agency you talked to last night to confirm the flight?
AI is usually about implementation details. Customers typically worry about solutions to problems. They don't care how solution is implemented - using AI or not.
I have a Pixel also, and have issues with is since the change to Gemini. It works _most_ of the time, but every once in a while it'll tell me it can't set a reminder.
I use reminders often so I suppose it is a low failure rate.
But, when they first made the change to Gemini I had to switch back for a few weeks/months before it could set reminders properly.
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.
I want the reminder not on my device, but on my work computer which I'll be staring at when I need the reminder. Or in the bananas case I want bananas sent to our shared family grocery app (which isn't a google service) so that if my wife happens to be going by a store tomorrow she knows to stop and get some along with flour or whatever else we need to stock up on.
Perhaps a step further: I do not need my phone to tell me an LLM-generated bedtime story involving a specified cast of characters, I just want it to reliably control existing functionality, dangit.
Like when a timed alarm is making the phone buzz in my pocket while I'm driving, I'm telling it to silence the alarm, and the response-voice is regretfully informing me that there are no alarms going off right now.
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.
For that "AI" this level of investment was not necessary though. What I mean is about companies that develops LLMs for general problem solving. They require huge investment yet their value yield is still very low.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
Readit News
What's more, I would love something akin to my current Galaxy a52s 5G with a display around 5.2-5.5" (I first had LG G2, then OnePlus3 which was already a bit bulky and now a52 as compromise; https://www.gsmarena.com/compare.php3?idPhone1=5543&idPhone2...)...
I do have iPhone SE (2022) and it's the size of LG G2 and I find quite handy. Something of that size but with slightly bigger screen (better screen-to-body ratio). Specs doesn't have super-hiper-premium… and the price should be sane (usually compact phones are like 20-40% higher, sic)
The iPhone mini was a billion dollar device. Anyone other than Apple would have called that a success.
Did you know that factories make less big-sized and small-sized shoes than average-sized ones? Because (surprise) buyers size distribution is not uniform.
“We tried to make big shoes many times and it doesn’t sell well enough”. Oh, really. I guess I’ll just cut holes for my fingers then.
Now that I'm ready to buy a new iPhone, the Mini has been discontinued! I think the Mini would have been and in fact was successful, but it's not successful "enough" to justify a separate model – they must have observed that people "like me" would still buy a flagship iPhone, even though we aren't 100% satisfied with the form factor.
Apple would rather have us buying a higher-margin flagship model and have an NPS of 65+ than a lower-margin mini model with an NPS of 80+.
My friend with similar instincts as me recently got a refurbished 13 Mini instead of the latest flagship. I'll probably get the flagship, because I value the satcom a little bit more than the form factor.
They should sell small phones. Because the whole family will be in on the brand, features, and services. I’ve heard many family members and friends say that they won’t give up their older small phones because Apple no longer makes new ones.
The idea that they don’t sell well is not a good enough reason when you are trying to capture the whole market for not just hardware but the lock in for services, apps, games, music, etc.
I also would love a smaller flagship spec'd phone.
I know it wont be popular, but I still want it.
I would love the new features (especially the camera and sat comm) but I’m not willing to get a bigger form factor device.
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...
https://youtu.be/iR9zBsKELVs?si=3o1qD-4R7lyezZwt
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.
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).
Normies hate the AI hypetrain bullshit.
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.
Literally every thing I used it for got answered via "I cannot do that yet" after it randomly opted me into that. Pure garbage.
Apple's approach of using current-boom AI to help you navigate and digest your own private trove of multimedia content (photos, videos, apps, notes, structured data, etc) is absolutely useful to people as well, and for some of us, one of the only personal uses of this AI that seems compelling at all.
I'm much more excited to have help finding that goofy picture of my cat by describing what I remember, so I can share it with a friend, than I am to have some chatbot dialog about entry-level Python with a hallucinating parlor trick.
But these features have to work, and work well, and work fast, and be widely known to work, before they'll really win the market. But that's going to take a minute and it might not even happen.
Hasn't Google been doing this forever? I can search random things in my photos (like pictures of an old car I owned).
But that whole find me something on my mutliple gigabytes of storage on my device account definitely seems like the mass appeal
Some personal examples of how I find it more useful (love to hear yours) and fun to use....
- Wanted to go on a hike an hour away from where both my friend (lives two hours west of me) and I live. Asked GPT what are some good hikes an hour drive away from both of us to meet & hike. With Google I have to do Many searches where GPT just provides the answer right away.
- I count calories and eat out everyday. GPT knows the calories of everything i eat as I eat at chains mostly (Cava, Panera, Starbucks, Chipolte). I tell it via voice what i just ate for my 1st meal, it calculates my calorie count and later I'll tell it what im having for my 2nd meal. It can also recall my calorie count from days ago. It does all this quickly vs. Google i'd have to do oodles of searches.
Usually Im using GPT the most when driving via voice and unlike Siri, GPT understands me and i can have whole conversations with it to get things done while driving.
Imagine an AI that popped up when you are reading something and warned you that information is false.
For instance, imagine something like https://theconversation.com/can-ai-talk-us-out-of-conspiracy... helping people discern about news and propaganda.
Since that seems to be an increasingly niche desire (at least as far as the product managers are concerned), I've been looking more and more seriously at setting up my own local voice assistant. My main barrier has been hardware—the mic arrays in the Home devices are surprisingly good and hard to beat with cheap off-the-shelf components, and you need a good mic for good STT.
[1]: https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/openai_conversati...
Teach a man to fish!
Also, being able to talk to my mailbox asking questions about subjects mentioned in my e-mails would be a huge time saver.
Imagine a purely local Microsoft Recall-like thing that could answer questions about things you saw, or that read the news articles you went over quickly and answer complicated questions about them much later, at a time you just started to regret not having bookmarked it for future reading.
I'm having a horrifying realization that all of my pictures are "fake" in the sense that they don't match what I saw/experienced. Maybe it's time to get back into Polaroids.
If you actually peak under the hood they just pass through weighted selectors, no different than a switch statement
Deleted Comment
Nah.
Smartphone cameras stopped being shitty a while ago, long before AI and computational photography hacks.
What you mean to say is they without AI, you'd know sooner that the smartphone maker put a cheap, shitty camera in your "premium" phone.
>People do care about that. AI isn't just LLM chatbots.
Yeah, it's also fake image generation featuring humans with a funny number of fingers.
What AI isn't is a camera.
This assumes that the capabilities and use cases are unchanged. Yes, for the AI features available today, I suppose ChatGPT can do much of it -- I wouldn't know because it's not interesting or useful to me, so I don't use it.
But: If I'm deciding whether AI features are important to me in making a decision to spend money on a future phone, it's those future AI features that I will be assessing.
95% of my everyday needs for an external intelligence (besides my own) are covered by e-mail, text, and phone calls with other humans, with a trivial portion covered by nascent AI features. As this changes, and AI gets more capable of replacing human intelligence in these interactions (TBD if this happens in the next smartphone generation, or the next human generation, or further in the future), then I will /very much/ care that the electronic device that I use most often day-to-day has access to these capabilities, and will very much use access to those capabilities as part of deciding where to spend my money.
True, but it is an external service with all the privacy concerns that entails. I appreciate eg. Apple pushing local AI but at the same time I don’t think it needs to ship with the OS. Just provide an AI API apps can hook into then I can decide which models I want and where they run.
Weird! Mine can still create reminders, as well as set timers and alarms.
Today, this is nearly available, nearly. Probably only something Google/apple can realistically offer. Apple “intelligence” has started to read your notifications and rewrite them for you, so it shouldn’t be a big leap to listen for a United App notification and decide it’s urgent enough take action. Should be “trivial” for Google to do as well, and they could even run it server side to help without a phone present.
It's still pretty terrible though
2. How does it know which contacts to contact? Does that acquaintance you talked to for some professional reason need to know your flight got rescheduled? What about that travel agency you talked to last night to confirm the flight?
I use reminders often so I suppose it is a low failure rate.
But, when they first made the change to Gemini I had to switch back for a few weeks/months before it could set reminders properly.
Like when a timed alarm is making the phone buzz in my pocket while I'm driving, I'm telling it to silence the alarm, and the response-voice is regretfully informing me that there are no alarms going off right now.
Dead Comment
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.
Those LLMs we have around just aren't that.
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/ I'm not affiliated with them, just the first article I found on the topic
(opinion my own)
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.
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.
Otherwise why don’t they let older devices use their server-side private LLM setup?