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Smartphone buyers meh on AI, care more about battery life

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

#171

Post by rsynnott »

iscrewyou wrote: post #73
dageshi wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been hearing this sentiment for 10+ years, but it's been tried and each time it's tried it doesn't sell well enough.

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…

They have repeatedly attempted to sell small phones. They don't sell in significant numbers, unfortunately.

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

#172

Post by qup »

fao_ wrote: post #156
okasaki wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'm not sure that a hallucinated image of something is better than the original image when you're doing spywork. The difference between whether someone has 4 or 5 fingers, whether they're holding a gun versus a random object, or whether they're mixed-race or caucasian, all seem like they would be pretty important things. Likewise, car number plates, signage in the photo that help identify where it is, metadata of the…

He's not talking about generating images, he's talking about classifying existing ones.

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

#173

Post by slashdave »

nerdjon wrote: post #10

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 bas…

Photo manipulation is another example.

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).

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

#174

Post by bluGill »

jonplackett wrote: post #40

These stats seem like the reverse of the story in the headline > A quarter of smartphone owners (25%) don't find AI features helpful, So does that mean 75% _do_ find AI Feature helpful? > 45% are reluctant to pay a monthly subscription fee for AI capabilities Are 55% happy to pay a monthly fee? >34% have privacy concerns. 66% have no privacy concerns?

Those stats are wrong in another way - everything is about tradeoffs. If the AI is really good I can pay a price to use it - the price depends on how good it is. If the AI is really good I can ignore some privacy concerns - not all but some (indeed in order to work it probably must ignore some privacy concerns)

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

#175

Post by grahamj »

binarymax wrote: post #53
brtkdotse wrote: post #2

Never mind AI, I just want Siri to have better text-to-speech quality than my freaking vacuum cleaner.

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.

I think it’s at least partly cost reduction. Push everything to the phone so people have to pay more for phones and they pay less for infra. Win-win.

Otherwise why don’t they let older devices use their server-side private LLM setup?

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

#179

Post by rbanffy »

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.

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.

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

#180

Post by bluGill »

mmmore wrote: post #25
brianshaler wrote: post #5

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

Unfortunately, people don't buy small phones as much. https://youtu.be/iR9zBsKELVs?si=3o1qD-4R7lyezZwt

There are a lot of different phones. People don't buy Sony as much as Samsung.
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