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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

#221

Post by dageshi »

karaterobot wrote: post #185
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.

"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.

I'm sorry to say this, but again just face the reality of the fact that not enough people truly want this size of phone.

There's a congregation of people on HN who do, I suspect they're also the type of people who'll run their phones for 5+ years where their bigger phone buying brethren are replacing every year or two at most.

The market for the "small" smartphone just isn't profitable enough to bother with for most manufacturers.

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

#222

Post by ip26 »

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…

There's a lot we quietly take for granted. Supposedly the NPUs on phones were originally added to let the phone identify objects in your photo library. When shopping for phones, I tend to shop for better battery and camera... but I also wouldn't go back to a photo library without identification.

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

#223

Post by 243423443 »

x0x0 wrote: post #217
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…

I would kinda like search that works over my thousands of photos

Google Photos has that. But I guess you mean locally?

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

#224

Post by x0x0 »

243423443 wrote: post #223
x0x0 wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would kinda like search that works over my thousands of photos

Google Photos has that. But I guess you mean locally?

Google photos search doesn't work well at all for me.

Even things like "[my dog name] beach" isn't reliable.

Or things like I use photos as notes. It doesn't reliably recall things like cheese when I take pictures of cheese in various stores to remember what is sold where. Not even the name of the cheese; just cheese. Ditto spices.

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

#225

Post by ryandrake »

AI is a technology, not a product feature. I don't care about the underlying technology in my products, I care what they do for me. As long as the feature is great, I don't care if it's made with traditional algorithms, AI, or literal magic--it doesn't matter!

This idea that customers want AI is like saying that customers want applications written in Python. Why would they care what's behind the curtain?

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

#226

Post by jandrese »

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…

I just did a battery replacement on a Pixel 6a. It wasn't terribly expensive, $18 for the whole kit, but the process was very nerve wracking. Unlike Apple's relatively friendly rubber cement Google used some kind of industrial adhesive to glue everything together. You need a good amount of heat to loosen it, but not too much because that will damage the phone. There's a fine line. They do include a helpful strap for removing the battery, but you have that awful glue to deal with. The cherry on top is the slippery little spring clip connector you need to remove without damaging the board underneath.

All in all it made me pine for the days when you could just pop the back off of the phone and yank the battery out to replace it. Personally I think I could live with a 0.8mm thicker phone that still has this feature. Also a headphone jack while you are at it.

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

#227

Post by ziml77 »

bluGill wrote: post #154
no_wizard wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If you were an important CEO or something, and you had a competent human Personal Assistant - would you allow them to reschedule your appointments if you were running late? Yes, why wouldn’t I? I could also give them parameters like “if I’m more than 20 minutes late please re-schedule this” or “if my flight is delayed please let everyone know it’s delayed” Why wouldn’t I do that? Presumably the person hired is compe…

Important CEOs bring their trusted human assistant with them. Those of us at a lower level don't get that option, but at the CEO level you get to hire your own sectary and you spend years teaching them how you work and what to do in all the situations that come up and so they will make the right decisions often enough that you can trust them. Or they know they are not trusted to reschedule that appointment and so the…

Personalizing any automation like that is a privacy nightmare. The system needs to know a lot about your preferences and the decisions you'd normally make yourself as well as your current circumstances since those will also influence your choices. How do you feed that into any AI without being problematic for privacy?

Having one running locally helps but it's still necessarily storing information that you might not want to have stored where someone could potentially retrieve it, either via some sort of exploit or by forcibly compelling you to give it up.

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

#228

Post by ossobuco »

rbanffy wrote: post #199
kredd wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> If you’re mostly scrolling and consuming Imagine an AI that popped up when you are reading something and warned you that information is false. For instance, imagine something like https://theconversation.com/can-ai-talk-us-out-of-conspiracy... helping people discern about news and propaganda.

And who's going to teach the AI what's a conspiracy and what's not? Battles have been fought over what narrative certain Wikipedia pages should push; it's pretty hard to find information that can be objectively considered the truth.

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

#229

Post by jandrese »

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…

IMHO the era of "we assume you're going to have a case on this" was cemented in place the instant the camera bump appeared. If you can't set you phone down on a service without it being all tippy thanks to the off center camera bump then you're clearly expected to stuff it into a case that is at least that thick.

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

#230

Post by reportingsjr »

lancesells wrote: post #202
itsoktocry wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Google photos is way, way, way better than apple photos at this. It’s not even a competition.

I have my sister’s dogs named in my google photos library. Every time I a take a picture of either dog, they are automatically tagged and added to a shared album I set up for my sister.

I have nieces and nephews with photos from newborn age to 10+ years old, and it has managed to organize them across their growth and ages. It’s incredible. I can search for “ ” and get every photo of her on a certain vacation to make a family scrap book.

Apple photos search and tagging is pitiful in comparison.

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