Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem is that although what most people use on a daily basis is small nearly everyone uses something unusual app for _something_. I think it would be quite hard to find a market large enough that didn’t include such people. There is a solution sitting there, which is running Android and having the AI run it behind the scenes I guess, but is suspect that would end up looking a lot like we have now.
This is the fundamental problem with all of these hypothetical new devices. If you assume you can come up with some new UI or innovative interaction model, maybe it’s purely voice or whatever else, then you have to ask if this could just run on a phone. Modern smartphones won’t be supplanted by tech that could just run on a phone. That doesn’t make any sense. For any new tech to take off and replace phones, it has to…
I don't necessarily agree that “A phone, but it has AI and no apps” is a good product, but it could be considered additive.
When the iPhone came out, it was "a pocket computer, but without a physical keyboard and mouse" and some might have argued that it was subtractive because of that. Maybe we shouldn't be thinking about "apps" as something inherently required by any future device ever created.