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.

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), 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.

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).

“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.

Why can’t they make smaller phones?

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.

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?

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.

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

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.