Posted by retskrad 10/25/2024
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.
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.
I don't know if LLM-based translation is better than previous translation models.
Getting hardware to enable faster AI processing on phones should be good thing if used for useful tasks, LLM or not.
E.g. if it sees that I always reopen an application 2 seconds after the OS kills it in the background, then maybe it shouldn't be killed.
Or if I wake up 3 minutes before the alarm would go off, and take a trip to the toilet, maybe it shouldn't blow up the speaker while I'm frantically pulling up my underpants, but recognize that I'm already awake, or at least wait with the alarm until I'm around the phone again.
Or automatic backlight shouldn't go crazy when I walk in the night under the streetlamps, it should recognize that lamps are coming and going, and that backlight adjustment every 5 seconds is silly and annoying.
I could go on. IMO there is definitely a place for machine learning/AI in phones (and other places too), especially for quality of life thingies. Just nobody is doing them, I guess becacuse these are not as visible as image generation. My credit card has been ready to spend on such developments since at least 2021. One of these days I will have enough of waiting and do it myself, out of spite...
I'd also love to be able to give commands that traverse multiple apps (e.g. take my google sheet and venmo request everyone the specified amount). Most likely this would happen by teaching an AI tool use and having apps expose an API.
I'd love to be able to give voice commands for certain things (e.g. flipping through recipes when my hands are wet) and have the phone be able to do the actual thing I want.
I actually think phones are a much better place for AI since they're so difficult to type on that voice could provide a higher-bandwidth interface.
AI could provide more human-oriented direction that focus on key landmarks and decisions rather than every minor turn. For example:
"Hop on 80 West, cross the bridge, take Sir Francis Drake onto 101 South, take the Alexander Avenue exit, don't go through the tunnel, and your destination will be on the right."
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.
Otherwise, totally with you. No idea why my phone needs AI. I can just open the ChatGPT app if I want to have a discussion with ChatGPT about something. I'm so tired of apps updating to "Add a new AI assistant!" like why do I need to talk to an LLM in most of the apps I use?
Here's my write-up alongside some interesting dataviz : https://picked.arnaud.at/news/smartphone-data-science
Of course, aside from checking email and calendar I don't do a lot of work from my phone.
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. ;)
Well, people are probably going to put cases on their phone regardless, so the phone has to be thin enough that even with a case it's still a manageable size.
But I agree that battery is where phones ultimately fail most of the time. I have had a Samsung S10 for a bit over 5 years now and it is the battery that is going to force me to retire it and get a new one. Speed, storage, screen quality, camera quality are all perfectly fine for my use case. But the battery rarely lasts a full day with any kind of usage now which is annoying.
I would love a phone with a replaceable battery. But I agree that the average consumer won't bother, they will just get a new one (or they will have upgraded before battery life ever becomes an issue).
https://www.ifixit.com/products/galaxy-s10-replacement-batte...
It's slightly annoying to replace, but even if you have a shop do it, it's far cheaper than a new phone.
https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Samsung+Galaxy+S10+Battery+Repl...
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.
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.
All in all it made me pine for the days when you could just pop the back off of the phone and yank the battery out to replace it. Personally I think I could live with a 0.8mm thicker phone that still has this feature. Also a headphone jack while you are at it.