Man I really just want email, texting, and a web browser on my phone. More "stuff" to do is an anti feature for me.
Maybe Apple actually had it right with the first iPhone. No apps, just e-mail, texting and a good web browser.
Smartphone buyers meh on AI, care more about battery life
311–320 of 343 posts
Re: Smartphone buyers meh on AI, care more about battery life
#312Earlier quoted context omitted.
The thing is it isn't reliable enough to rely on the answer from just one question for anything that matters.
I don't really understand why it is acceptable to speak for others on this topic. It is fine if it doesn't work well for you. It is also fine if it works well for others. These blanket statements lead to flame wars.
I would suggest that that would make more sense as a response to the upthread comment: “Im not sure people really know how to use an AI chat bot or understand its a more powerful, quicker and personally more fun way of getting information then just a Google search” than it does to someone explaining why they disagree that the only explanation for people not agreeing with the superiority of AI Chatbots is that they don't know how to use them or understand their innate superiority.
Re: Smartphone buyers meh on AI, care more about battery life
#313I'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 feel like many of the commenters in this thread are asking (sometimes demanding) that their devices offer a duality that can’t be met; do you want smaller phones or do you want longer battery life with more compute? At the moment, those are mutually exclusive goals. Thermodynamics can be a PITA but we’re doing (almost) the best we can.
Re: Smartphone buyers meh on AI, care more about battery life
#314Earlier quoted context omitted.
On iPhone, if I take a picture of a plant or animal, it identifies it for me. It's not 100% by any means, but it's useful enough. I've figured out what were baby plants I wanted vs. weeds. I've figure out species of birds I'd taken photos of with my SLR (ie: phone takes picture of Lightroom editing the image, and is able to identify it from that... I'd prefer there was a way to not require me to take a photo of my mo…
While true your examples are AI, I believe in this case AI is being used in this context to mean LLM-based AI. I don't know if LLM-based translation is better than previous translation models.
While the AI focus these days is on LLMs, AFAICT, the NPUs and GPU accelerators are just generically fast MUL, and MAD machines with varying precisions, which should help any AI, and even non-AI tasks likes image filter kernels.
Getting hardware to enable faster AI processing on phones should be good thing if used for useful tasks, LLM or not.
Re: Smartphone buyers meh on AI, care more about battery life
#315Earlier 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. The iPhone mini was a billion dollar device. Anyone other than Apple would have called that a success.
That’s one of the big problems with these dominant trillion dollar corporations. For them it’s not worth to pursue something as small as a billion dollar market but they still have enough market power to suppress any competitor who wants to deliver such a product. That’s why we are seeing less and less innovation and diversity compared to the 1980s to around 2000
> That’s why we are seeing less and less innovation and diversity compared to the 1980s to around 2000
You think the pace of innovation has stalled and the tech industry is less diverse than it was 20-50 years ago? Really?
Having cut my teeth on the tech of the late-seventies, that’s not a perspective I share. I have long been impressed with how fast new tech makes it into our grubby little hands. From my perspective, if we were stuck at the pace of innovation present during my early days, well, I think it’s not unlikely we’d still be using feature-phones and WAP gateways so we could tinker with that new mobile-internet stuff everyone’s raving about.
Re: Smartphone buyers meh on AI, care more about battery life
#316Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don’t produce it in the same volumes then? Did you know that factories make less big-sized and small-sized shoes than average-sized ones? Because (surprise) buyers size distribution is not uniform. “We tried to make big shoes many times and it doesn’t sell well enough”. Oh, really. I guess I’ll just cut holes for my fingers then.
> fingers Lol
Ah, cringe. In my defense, https://www.reddit.com/r/LinguisticMaps/comments/pyrli2/whic...
Re: Smartphone buyers meh on AI, care more about battery life
#317For it to have value they need to effectively apply it for something useful and have it be reliable, not just go hey we have llms. like if i could say siri share my location with my wife and text her "im on my way" oh and send her a pic of what im looking at through my sunglasses. And it worked 99% of the time, and could figure out to do it through google maps because she has android, that would be great.
Exactly. I remember imagining naively in 2010 that the introduction of Siri meant I would be able to just ask my phone to do simple things like update settings or manipulate the built-in apps using natural language, things chatGPT could easily do even a year ago if it had the needed API hooks. Including doing things on a schedule, compound sentences, etc. Instead we got a very brittle text adventure that can neither correctly transcribe your words, let alone understand your intention, and it’s never even changed.
“Siri get me directions to McDonald’s” ‘I found this on the web for you:’
Or it would get directions to a McDonalds in a different state. Or say “I’m sorry, I don’t see a McDonald in your contacts.”
Re: Smartphone buyers meh on AI, care more about battery life
#318Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is an underrated take. Apple, especially, wants to leverage their excellent silicon to do “AI” locally in the name of privacy purely as a marketing advantage, but the tradeoffs there are major (burning my battery instead of data center AC power, plus, my phone will never be better or faster than some big metal GPU with fans), and the privacy issue could just as well be solved by doing a good job designing the se…
You can use their cloud instead of local compute if you'd like: https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/ Building a privacy aware cloud is a lot harder than you think it is. Apple is going the whole way with remote attestation, hardware root of trust, software BOM, etc. https://security.apple.com/blog/pcc-security-research/
They are, and I actually believe that they’ve done a good job of all that stuff (though suspect that using their weird Mac hardware in the DC can’t possibly be a truly superior option to the NVIDIA hardware the entire rest of the world is using, but let’s assume I’m wrong).
But are you suggesting I will be able to flip a switch to use their cloud for all the same AI stuff instead of my battery-powered phone? That would be really welcome news! I haven’t used any of the betas so I know nothing about how “Apple Intelligence” works.
Re: Smartphone buyers meh on AI, care more about battery life
#319Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is an underrated take. Apple, especially, wants to leverage their excellent silicon to do “AI” locally in the name of privacy purely as a marketing advantage, but the tradeoffs there are major (burning my battery instead of data center AC power, plus, my phone will never be better or faster than some big metal GPU with fans), and the privacy issue could just as well be solved by doing a good job designing the se…
The problem is that remote solutions to the privacy problem inevitably involve my trusting someone else's privacy assurances. On-device processing reduces the trust required, although of course it doesn't eliminate it. The common response to this is to point out that I'm trusting Apple or Google anyway just by using their phones, which is true, but (1) since phones are directly accessible to security researchers, the…
Thanks for a well-reasoned take on why someone would prefer this side of that tradeoff. Fair points.
Re: Smartphone buyers meh on AI, care more about battery life
#320Earlier 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. :)
My main use of Google assistant is to add things to my shopping list while I'm cooking. Switched to gemini, which I could have a human like conversation to get information about any topic but it just couldn't add items to the shopping list. I switched back. I didn't need a chatbot to keep me company I needed an assistant.