Smartphone buyers meh on AI, care more about battery life • Hacker News Board

Re: Smartphone buyers meh on AI, care more about battery life

#141

Post by hedora » Fri, Oct 25, 2024, 4:53 PM UTC

tra3 wrote: post #98

vvladymyrov wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 usage…

Oh boy I hope that doesn’t happen to me. It took them a week to get iPhone 13 mini battery in.

I recently brought an SE2 in for a screen + battery swap, which basically means they'd just give me a new SE2 at a steep discount.

They didn't try to upsell me at all, but I ended up getting an SE3 anyway (I didn't realize there even was a newer SE).

Re: Smartphone buyers meh on AI, care more about battery life

#142

Post by dylan604 » Fri, Oct 25, 2024, 4:53 PM UTC

no_wizard wrote: post #81

est31 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

what about the infamous recognizing the moon in the background that is just an over exposed white fuzzy circle and replacing with a stock image with full surface details? clearly there's some sort of ML/recognition of content within the image

Re: Smartphone buyers meh on AI, care more about battery life

#143

Post by Nicholas_C » Fri, Oct 25, 2024, 4:53 PM UTC

aiono wrote: post #102

AI companies are desperately trying to find actual use cases but it seems like there is not that much to justify current investment.

Sounds a little like crypto although there are actual use cases for AI. Just not as many as investors think.

Re: Smartphone buyers meh on AI, care more about battery life

#144

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o » Fri, Oct 25, 2024, 4:54 PM UTC

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.

Re: Smartphone buyers meh on AI, care more about battery life

#145

Post by itsoktocry » Fri, Oct 25, 2024, 4:54 PM UTC

swatcoder wrote: post #113

mondobe wrote: post #3

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.

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 exc…

>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).

Re: Smartphone buyers meh on AI, care more about battery life

#146

Post by itsoktocry » Fri, Oct 25, 2024, 4:56 PM UTC

dylan604 wrote: post #135

swatcoder wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 exc…

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 direct…

>But that whole find me something on my mutliple gigabytes of storage on my device account definitely seems like the mass appeal

This is such a mundane use of AI, but unsurprising Apple would sell it as revolutionary.

Re: Smartphone buyers meh on AI, care more about battery life

#147

Post by dboreham » Fri, Oct 25, 2024, 4:57 PM UTC

no_wizard wrote: post #81

est31 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

That's what AI is. The weights are the clever part. Cameras have done this since the Nikon FA in 1983.

Re: Smartphone buyers meh on AI, care more about battery life

#148

Post by HumblyTossed » Fri, Oct 25, 2024, 4:58 PM UTC

addaon wrote: post #127

mondobe wrote: post #3

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.

> 95% of everyday AI needs 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 assess…

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.

Re: Smartphone buyers meh on AI, care more about battery life

#149

Post by okasaki » Fri, Oct 25, 2024, 4:59 PM UTC

swatcoder wrote: post #113

mondobe wrote: post #3

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.

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 exc…

It's great for spooks too. Now they just have to exfiltrate the keywords describing the images instead of the images themselves.

Re: Smartphone buyers meh on AI, care more about battery life

#150

Post by paul7986 » Fri, Oct 25, 2024, 4:59 PM UTC

kredd wrote: post #37

mondobe wrote: post #3

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 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.