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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

#201

Post by jsbisviewtiful »

changing1999 wrote: post #181
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.

> Even camera improvements are overblown.

I would love to take a photo using my smartphone that doesn't look pixelated, blurry and or over-processed. Maybe asking too much considering smartphone sensors can't compete with DSLRs in some situations, but I'm always baffled with how dark and desaturated some of my photos turn out on my smartphone, as well.

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

#202

Post by lancesells »

itsoktocry wrote: post #145
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…

> 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).

iOS has been doing this for a bit too. I don't use it enough to really know how good it is but I can definitely look for cats or people I know. Haven't used Apple Intelligence yet so maybe that's better as well?

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

#203

Post by marcosdumay »

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.

There are lots and lots of use cases for good AI.

Those LLMs we have around just aren't that.

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

#204

Post by Benjaminsen »

grahamj wrote: post #175
binarymax wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

OpenAI whisper runs on iOS native on device, can't be just costs. https://github.com/openai/whisper/discussions/407

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

#205

Post by arnaudsm »

I calculated and found almost no correlation (r=0.2) between battery life and price. Which is quite sad considering it's the most important feature to consumers.

Here's my write-up alongside some interesting dataviz : https://picked.arnaud.at/news/smartphone-data-science

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

#206

Post by idle_zealot »

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 does this mean? Sure, if generative AI is filling in features that weren't present, anyone would call that doctored or fake. But computational photography is mostly about recognizing patterns and filling in assumed detail... which is also how your visual cortex works.

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

#208

Post by [deleted] »

jsbisviewtiful wrote: post #201
changing1999 wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Even camera improvements are overblown. I would love to take a photo using my smartphone that doesn't look pixelated, blurry and or over-processed. Maybe asking too much considering smartphone sensors can't compete with DSLRs in some situations, but I'm always baffled with how dark and desaturated some of my photos turn out on my smartphone, as well.

[deleted]

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

#209

Post by marcosdumay »

NoboruWataya wrote: post #86
Syonyk wrote: post #18

> The biggest motivation for US adult smartphone owners to upgrade their devices is longer battery life (61%)... Battery replacements are a thing. They're apparently not a common thing, unfortunately, because that might impact new phone sales... and even on devices where it's trivial, people don't seem to do it. A decade ago or so I was doing a lot of Nexus 5 battery swaps for people because one of the battery OEMs w…

> Based on the fact that easily 90+% of phones I see in the wild have cases on them, physical size and thickness isn't a big factor Well, people are probably going to put cases on their phone regardless, so the phone has to be thin enough that even with a case it's still a manageable size. But I agree that battery is where phones ultimately fail most of the time. I have had a Samsung S10 for a bit over 5 years now an…

People didn't put cases on all phones at the time they could survive small falls and were thick enough to handle.
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