I can understand why. Most of the generative AI crap we're being force-fed these days is a solution looking for a problem. On my Samsung, the only really useful AI features they provide are erasing things in photos and upscaling. The generation is weak compared to even basic stable diffusion and otherwise they're all fluff features and sometimes give me the same vibes as the "Make Longer" feature on Notion. As far as apps go, I really don't need a chatbot in every app.
Smartphone buyers meh on AI, care more about battery life
61–70 of 343 posts
Re: Smartphone buyers meh on AI, care more about battery life
#62I'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 got an appointment with Apple to replace the battery in my iPhone 13 mini. I would love the new features (especially the camera and sat comm) but I’m not willing to get a bigger form factor device.
Good luck. I’ve tried to replace battery in mine 12 mini last week - with no success. I had to leave my phone for 4 hours or several days (if they brake screen during battery replacement, they will wait for replacement phone to be shipped overnight). Also representative was convincing me to buy a new phone - saying that battery replacement won’t help much because new ios versions has features which high battery usages, while newer iphones has larger battery and hardware optimizations for these new features. I’m thinking about iPhone 16 now while keeping iPhone 12 mini as backup phone.
Re: Smartphone buyers meh on AI, care more about battery life
#63> 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 Everyone says this, but I wonder if the sales data says otherwise, because device manufacturers, especially Apple, REALLY love to advertise how thin their devices are. Personally, I don't want a super thin device because I feel like the slightest bending force is going to snap it in half…
Apple's mobile division still seems to struggle with the ghost of Jony Ive. At least their laptop division was willing to rethink things with the Apple Silicon transition and go back to things that worked.
The late Intel-era portable Macs were simply broken, because of Ive's apparent obsession with "thin for thin's sake." Or, more probably, "thin for the sake of industrial design awards." They innovated 20% too much on keyboard design with the butterfly keyboard that was simply a bad design. I don't know what else to call a keyboard that reliably breaks after a few years of service. But, bad though that it is, it was even worse because you couldn't replace the keyboard. You had to replace the whole top case and battery, at something like $700, when one key went bad, because the whole thing was integrated to save a mm or two. Not only did they un-solve a solved problem (reliable laptop keyboards), they even un-solved the ability to replace a keyboard when it gets mangled, or something spills in it, or a random failure happens.
But, worse, they went with the USB-C only design (the thinnest port!), meaning that every owner of one of those laptops I knew had a pile of assorted adapters in their bag so they could do things that most people want to do every now and then with a laptop, like drive an external display for a presentation, read a USB-A storage device, or read a micro SD card. Yes, the laptop was thinner, but at the cost of needing to carry extra stuff with you to work around the lack of ports.
And then, because it was so thin, they didn't have space to properly cool the zorching-fast Intel chips they put in them, and the chips would throttle badly while baking the machine.
The M-series laptops, shocking me incredibly, threw all that "design" out the window, and went back to something actually useful. They cool well (admittedly, that's mostly the Apple Silicon barely needing cooling), they fixed the keyboard, and the machines have a useful set of ports on the side for "common tasks with a laptop" (SD, HDMI, headphone, plus the USB-C/Thunderbolt ports - still no A ports, though). And then enough battery to last just about forever.
Anyway, I hope their phone division works this sort of thing out too.
Re: Smartphone buyers meh on AI, care more about battery life
#64I 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.
I just asked my Pixel to remind me next Tuesday to pick the bananas, and it set that in Google Tasks. Which part of this doesn't work?
I asked if to create task for Monday morning. It created one, Monday 12AM.
Re: Smartphone buyers meh on AI, care more about battery life
#65These stats seem like the reverse of the story in the headline > A quarter of smartphone owners (25%) don't find AI features helpful, So does that mean 75% _do_ find AI Feature helpful? > 45% are reluctant to pay a monthly subscription fee for AI capabilities Are 55% happy to pay a monthly fee? >34% have privacy concerns. 66% have no privacy concerns?
The graph has multiple options for some of these.
45% unwilling to pay a monthly fee, 6% willing to pay a monthly fee.
Re: Smartphone buyers meh on AI, care more about battery life
#66I 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.
I just asked my Pixel to remind me next Tuesday to pick the bananas, and it set that in Google Tasks. Which part of this doesn't work?
I have a Pixel also, and have issues with is since the change to Gemini. It works _most_ of the time, but every once in a while it'll tell me it can't set a reminder.
I use reminders often so I suppose it is a low failure rate.
But, when they first made the change to Gemini I had to switch back for a few weeks/months before it could set reminders properly.
Re: Smartphone buyers meh on AI, care more about battery life
#67Re: Smartphone buyers meh on AI, care more about battery life
#68I'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 got an appointment with Apple to replace the battery in my iPhone 13 mini. I would love the new features (especially the camera and sat comm) but I’m not willing to get a bigger form factor device.
I just replaced the battery in my iPhone SE 2nd gen last month. Somehow I didn't know that that was possible. Best 80 € spent ever.
Re: Smartphone buyers meh on AI, care more about battery life
#69what's a realistic use case for ai on a mobile phone? i have yet to find myself saying "gee, if only i had ai on my phone, i could do XYZ!"
I used Google lens yesterday to get the artist name of a painting I liked, that was neat.
Re: Smartphone buyers meh on AI, care more about battery life
#70I 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.
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.
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