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

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

#181

Post by changing1999 » Fri, Oct 25, 2024, 5:16 PM UTC

rsynnott wrote: post #162

Today in incredibly obvious things... Smartphones are an absolute graveyard of fads; remember the 3D screen phones, the phones with projectors, and so forth? They generally go nowhere. I suspect 'AI' on phones will be similar. Overwhelmingly, what people want out of phones is "like my current phone, but with better battery life and maybe a better camera." Previously 'faster' was also a concern, but modern phones are…

Even camera improvements are overblown. My usage and photo quality did not improve much since ~iPhone 6. Taking decent travel photos, selfies, etc - I was happy with the results 10 years ago.

Technically, I understand the difference in the technology, I just don't know who needs that vs who gets excited about new features for a brief moment.

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

#182

Post by thrwaway1985882 » Fri, Oct 25, 2024, 5:17 PM UTC

candiddevmike wrote: post #128

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.

How do I disable that? I'm having a horrifying realization that all of my pictures are "fake" in the sense that they don't match what I saw/experienced. Maybe it's time to get back into Polaroids.

What makes a Polaroid any more "real" than an iPhone picture to you? Can any photo truly be real? (Deleuze has some interesting thoughts on the matter)

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

#183

Post by slashdave » Fri, Oct 25, 2024, 5:18 PM UTC

rishikeshs wrote: post #45

Why can’t they make smaller phones?

They can. It just that no one wants to buy them.

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

#184

Post by changing1999 » Fri, Oct 25, 2024, 5:18 PM UTC

Nicholas_C wrote: post #143

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.

It's very similar in regards to treating the increase in compute power consumption as a signal of "growth".

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

#185

Post by karaterobot » Fri, Oct 25, 2024, 5:19 PM UTC

dageshi wrote: post #34

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

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.

"Well enough" is doing a lot of work here. It's not that they aren't successful, it's that they aren't immediate, runaway hits, so the manufacturers conclude: why bother trying to build this market, let's just go back to the playbook. That's how you get mediocre products, which is where we are now.

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

#186

Post by renegade-otter » Fri, Oct 25, 2024, 5:19 PM UTC

artwr wrote: post #54

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.

I know that's true, but I find that the images on my Pixel are starting to have a bit of an eery feel, with some of the details looking more and more like AI generated images. I'd give back a bit of the quality for more "natural" looking images.

Here you go: https://www.theverge.com/c/24208960/digicam-digital-camera-c...

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

#187

Post by immibis » Fri, Oct 25, 2024, 5:20 PM UTC

JohnMakin wrote: post #22

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 incredible how bad it is. It actually seems to be getting worse year by year. I nearly crashed my car on the freeway trying to set a reminder to pay a toll the other day - I changed my mind and tried to get siri to cancel the action, and no matter what I said, she kept asking "what time? what time? what time?" on endless loop, and when siri is activated on my car's dashboard, I can't see the map - forcing me to…

FWIW you were not forced to distract yourself from the road - officially, you should have got off the freeway at the next exit and parked before sorting stuff out.

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

#188

Post by conradev » Fri, Oct 25, 2024, 5:21 PM UTC

radlad wrote: post #168

swatcoder wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a bit, and to a degree, yes. Last-decade image recognition and tagging teased what might be possible and is genuinely useful. The new LLM-ish tools promise that users can be more vague and casual in what language they use and more elaborate in how specific they mean to be; and that the queries (and operations) can span more diverse data sources.

Are there examples of new tools based on recent AI advancements that perform better than Google Photos image recognition?

Google highlighted the delta that recent advancements brought to their products:

https://blog.google/products/photos/ask-photos-google-io-202...

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

#189

Post by bluGill » Fri, Oct 25, 2024, 5:21 PM UTC

JohnMakin wrote: post #22

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 incredible how bad it is. It actually seems to be getting worse year by year. I nearly crashed my car on the freeway trying to set a reminder to pay a toll the other day - I changed my mind and tried to get siri to cancel the action, and no matter what I said, she kept asking "what time? what time? what time?" on endless loop, and when siri is activated on my car's dashboard, I can't see the map - forcing me to…

Even if everything worked you should not be trying to do that while driving. Keep your attention on the road - you are in control of several tons of metal moving at deadly speeds. (don't sing a long with the radio either)

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

#190

Post by the_arun » Fri, Oct 25, 2024, 5:22 PM UTC

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 is usually about implementation details. Customers typically worry about solutions to problems. They don't care how solution is implemented - using AI or not.