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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

#241
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only thing that changed for me was a that it couldn't control my smart Home devices anymore, nor activate navigation, nor send messages via Whatsapp (I.e. while driving). Literally every thing I used it for got answered via "I cannot do that yet" after it randomly opted me into that. Pure garbage.

Then why are you using it? I tried using Gemini once on my Pixel 6. Couldn't play music on Youtube music on verbal instructions, I switched back to Google Assistant. Will try it again after 6 months now. :)

In my case it just kinda.. switched over at some point, and frankly I didn't care enough to figure out how I might switch it back (if I even could). I had a similar frustration to GP that it stopped working for 100% of the queries I used to use it for.

That said, at some point it started working better, but there was a good 6-12 months where it was a tire fire.

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

#242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the execution is usually borked... I was eyeig ZenFone 9 (or something around that) and what? It was reported that it had problem with overheating and build quality. What's more, I would love something akin to my current Galaxy a52s 5G with a display around 5.2-5.5" (I first had LG G2, then OnePlus3 which was already a bit bulky and now a52 as compromise; https://www.gsmarena.com/compare.php3?idPhone1=5543&id…

iphone minis weren't particularly borked, and they didn't sell well enough, people apparently preferred the larger iphones (to my own dismay)

In my case, they took so long to announce the iPhone 12 Mini that I gave up waiting and bought an SE even though it was slower than I wanted and had a poor camera. Four months later they announced the Mini, but I wasn't willing to replace a four-month-old phone. Then they discontinued the Mini line after 13.

When I was ready to buy a new phone, there were no iPhone Mini models for sale. It took more than a year, but I finally found an iPhone 13 Mini in stock on the Apple Refurbished store. Now I'm hoping to keep this phone alive until they finally release another small iPhone.

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

#243
post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Why would you trust AI, something that regularly makes stuff up, to be able to accurately determine that?

the fun thing about the chatbots regularly making stuff up is that they almost always know when they're making stuff up. the hallucination problem isn't a problem of not knowing the facts, it's a problem of not knowing whether you want an accurate answer or a creative answer.

try asking chatGPT to only give you true and accurate answers and not make anything up.

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

#244
post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you trust AI, something that regularly makes stuff up, to be able to accurately determine that?

I trust a defective AI a lot more than I trust Fox News ;-) Now, more seriously, it'd need to put together a coherent argument and back it up with reputable sources, as just citing sources is very ineffective. The article I cited gives more details on possible approaches to that.

People eternally hoping that some new trick will finally make the other people understand how their side of the story/argument is one and only truly truthful. I guess this is old as mankind.

With your argument, the problem happens when given person goes to Fox news in the first place. Selection of the source has already been made, with its biases. Not much you can do or expect after this point.

Also, who curates the curator? Again an age old problem with no real, long term working solution in sight. No, you should not expect some statistical model to hold your hand through vast internet, while giving up any form of critical thinking, reasoning, or I guess any cerebral process altogether. Ultimate laziness. Since we know how much money there is in diet fad business, its safe to say this above will find its non-tiny desperate crowd.

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

#245
post #34

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.

Speaking for myself, I 100% would have bought an iPhone Mini, but I purchase new phones on a 5-6 year cycle. My iPhones were the 4S and the XS.

Now that I'm ready to buy a new iPhone, the Mini has been discontinued! I think the Mini would have been and in fact was successful, but it's not successful "enough" to justify a separate model – they must have observed that people "like me" would still buy a flagship iPhone, even though we aren't 100% satisfied with the form factor.

Apple would rather have us buying a higher-margin flagship model and have an NPS of 65+ than a lower-margin mini model with an NPS of 80+.

My friend with similar instincts as me recently got a refurbished 13 Mini instead of the latest flagship. I'll probably get the flagship, because I value the satcom a little bit more than the form factor.

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

#246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Mundane or not, it’s actually useful, a meaningful improvement, and should work consistently well.

That is in contrast to a lot of fancy AI demos which are a great party trick, but fall apart in actual usage, with their reliability being “maybe it will work this time, maybe it won’t, just keep retrying :)”.

Apple is pretty well-recognized for usually being a bit late to the party, but at least delivering stuff that’s polished.

Just look at this thread of people sharing how Gemini broke all their commands and automations. The Apple Intelligence Siri on the other hand works just fine (even if new features are arriving slowly).

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

#247
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.

> 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.

I'd caution that judicious/proper post-processing is actually needed if you want that result, because of the differences between the sensors.

Your human experience comes from many small pictures taken by a set of lenses panning across multiple points in a scene with constantly adjusting exposure times and focal lengths, all biologically composited into what feels like a single moment.

Trying to fully replicate that with a single artificial picture is going to be deficient in certain ways.

---

Separately, a pet peeve of mine: Too many people have been subtly brainwashed into conflating the "like I was really there" with " like a Hollywood film camera was really there." Then the next thing you know your medieval fantasy game has lens flares in it for no good reason.

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

#248
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.

Get raw, and marvel at its imperfection and ugliness in many aspects. If given phone ain't giving up raw data, take any decent camera, raw sensor data has been part of it since its beginning.

But those pics will be probably further from perceived reality than those enhanced by software (lets not get retarded here and don't brand every data processing as 'AI'). Distortions not only of barrel type, waning brightness towards edges, moire, heavy vignetting, tons of noise, over/underexposition, maybe some dead pixels... thats not how I see my days go by.

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

#250
Everyone sees through a stupid lifestyle theater instantly.

Life isn’t just driving around taking filtered selfies and finding friends faces in albums.

If phones didn’t suck, advanced functions would already be there without “ai”. But they lack any sensible integrations beyond the marketed scenes where clueless people are playing particular job, live and hobby moments.

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