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It's the “hardware”, stupid

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Re: It's the “hardware”, stupid

#81

Post by numpad0 »

goalieca wrote: post #24
embedding-shape wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't recall if the iPhone actually even had internet and maps at launch. I think the first time I saw an iPhone in person was in France maybe around 2007/2008 or something, and at that point it didn't even have the AppStore I'm fairly sure, just had the apps it came with. And most of the discussion I had with the owner wasn't about how it was "all-in-one package", but rather how much smoother the UI was compared t…

When Jobs first announced the iPhone, he really sold the idea that it was running a real web browser like on a desktop. Up to that point, there was a special mobile internet that really sucked.

The problem wasn't the special mobile internet but the operating systems. Most phone OS before iOS just couldn't run full Gecko/Trident/WebKit/what-have-you. The phones could reach any external IPv4 addresses, but there weren't much to do with neither browser nor an app store.

You could run things like IRC clients, dedicated text chat apps, and server rendered browsers on live Internet. But downloading full webpages was too much for the hardware.

Re: It's the “hardware”, stupid

#82

Post by jimbokun »

layer8 wrote: post #63
overvale wrote: post #23

> Ultimately, the answer is simple: reinventing AI is essentially reinventing the smartphone. I don’t think this is true at all. The smartphone is not some kind of endgame device after which there is no future. No more so than the train was the endgame of transportation. Why are we limiting our imagination about the future to only include what is true today?

On the other hand, a mobile AI device will only become really successful if it can replace the smartphone, and we aren’t anywhere close to that.

AI obviously doesn't need a dedicated hardware device to succeed. It's having massive success already as people access it from any of the devices they already own.

Smart phone, laptop, headsets, VR goggles, AI can work with all of these just fine.

I think part of Apple's struggles with AI is they can't find a way to tie it to their hardware in a differentiating way. Since it's so cloud based and there are few compelling use cases for running worse models locally, "AI" works just as well on any device.

Re: It's the “hardware”, stupid

#83

Post by brendoelfrendo »

supportengineer wrote: post #72
starky wrote: post #5

The article buries the lede on the only point that matters with these "AI" hardware devices. They need to solve a problem their customers have, and all the devices these companies have released so far don't do anything that a smartphone can't easily do.

An "AI Hardware" device that needs a network connection, and makes API calls to the mother ship, in order to accomplish anything, is not interesting . It's a Raspberry Pi. On the other hand, a device that could work offline is interesting. One that could work in a zombie apocalypse is even more interesting. Especially if it was solar powered and contained the knowledge needed to rebuild society.

> An "AI Hardware" device that needs a network connection, and makes API calls to the mother ship, in order to accomplish anything, is not interesting. It's a Raspberry Pi.

Kind of an unnecessary dig at the Raspberry Pi, no? Modern Pis and SBCs in general are good at lots of things. I use mine for self-hosting some apps I use, and I've definitely seen them used in little compute clusters for AI inference.

> On the other hand, a device that could work offline is interesting. One that could work in a zombie apocalypse is even more interesting. Especially if it was solar powered and contained the knowledge needed to rebuild society.

This is kind of interesting in an abstract sense; it's fun to imagine burying a solar-powered oracle in a hardshell case in a bunker somewhere so that some hypothetical person can use it to bootstrap civilization after the end, but that's all it really is: hypothetical. Fun to imagine. A project for hackers or maybe a non-profit. It certainly fails the "toothbrush test" mentioned in the article; no one will be consulting their doomsday box once or twice a day (absent a doomsday, anyway).

If I can be really reductionist for a second, I think there's a lot of AI cart-before-horse happening with these hardware products. Smartphones changed the world a decade and a half ago because they took something that people wanted--the internet, but mobile--and finally made it work. Since then they've dramatically changed the landscape of the internet and social media etc, but the idea--that people already had the internet but wanted to interact with it in a different way--should probably be the foundation for how we think about AI hardware products. What can they do for people better than what they already have? We should not need the benefit of hindsight to see why something like the Human AI pin, that doesn't really do anything and does it badly, failed.

Re: It's the “hardware”, stupid

#84

Post by fwip »

ElijahLynn wrote: post #58
andai wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me the interesting part was that OpenAI's only viable option for a mobile OS is Android, while Google is their main competitor.

Well, I wouldn't put it past that. It could literally feed Android into an llm context window and probably redesign it to be even better and it already is. Android still has weird laggy jumps and just is not that smooth. Even on the new pixel devices.

Is this... a joke?

Re: It's the “hardware”, stupid

#85

Post by macNchz »

galaxyLogic wrote: post #80

> iPhone wasn't successful because of its beautiful design Relatively speaking I think that gave it an edge which helped make it successful. I don't think Apple products in general have the best most usable designs, but they do have the most beautiful, most stylish most sophisticated-looking designs. People want that because a device like phone is part of their identity.

Totally. In a world of pretty ugly flip phones and Blackberries, the minimalist early iPhone designs definitely looked cool at the time, and were attention grabbing to a degree. I think it definitely kept that edge for some time against early Android phones, which weren't necessarily as attractive.

Re: It's the “hardware”, stupid

#86

Post by brendoelfrendo »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #69

Kind of weird that nobody's talking about getting rid of the hardware? An ESP32 that streams compressed audio over a mobile connection is all you should need to replace the "smarts" in a cellphone. Have a remote server do it all, and the local device is just a glorified mic and earbud. Give me a clickwheel and an audible user interface and I can do 90% of what I use a computer for.

Because that sounds terrible? What would I use this for? Reading email or browsing the internet? I can read faster than an AI can dictate to me. Though I'm sure I could adapt somewhat, as I understand that people using screen-readers are already able to use them quite quickly, I don't really want to. I can't play my favorite games via an audio interface, I can't watch a movie, and just about any attempt at using such a device for work would be compromised by the knowledge that I'd be able to do the same thing more efficiently with a keyboard. Heck, just the idea of verbalizing commands means I probably can't use it for work outside of an office, because I can't exactly go around in public verbalizing company information every time I need to get something done on the go.

Re: It's the “hardware”, stupid

#87

Post by tagyro »

proee wrote: post #22

I would love to know if Ives was truly foundation to the iPhone, or if he was more given the overall idea and polished it with the final look/feel (which is also important). Who was the exact individual that had the vision for glass multi-touch screens and sick gesture like effects (scroll). Perhaps the team just sat around a table and came up with the vision. Or maybe it was Jobs, but clearly there were some good vi…

Back in 2006 I saw this demo video from Jeff Han https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcKqyn-gUbY so when the iPhone came out I really wasn't surprised by the multi-touch part. And, as others have pointed out, scroll inertia wasn't a new concept - I also remember a Flash website (or demo) from yugop (Yugo Nakamura) or Tokyo Flash (I really don't remember whom) that had it in the interface, all very fluid.

Was the iPhone revolutionary? Absolutely!

But, imho, it was built on evolutionary advancements.

Re: It's the “hardware”, stupid

#88

Post by macintux »

altcognito wrote: post #57
mrandish wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Who was the exact individual that had the vision for glass multi-touch screens and sick gesture like effects (scroll). Like almost all new products later thought of as 'visionary' innovations, the first iPhone built on pre-existing ideas but integrated them particularly well and added some excellent new refinements. It's easy to forget that the prior five years had been a crucible of in-market experimentation betwe…

The iPhone was the first really well done general purpose computing phone. It had a real web browser, a real music player, apps that didn't suck. Adoption was huge because the design was great, but we would have just seen the same thing transpire over a number of years if iPhone hadn't been created. I know a lot of people basically who were basically saying "finally"

> but we would have just seen the same thing transpire over a number of years if iPhone hadn't been created.

Maybe, but I’m not certain we would have converged on a single form factor. Only Apple had the retail, marketing, software, hardware capabilities, discipline, and incentives to throw everything behind the minimalistic design and single form factor and turn it into a hit.

Everyone else was splitting their efforts across multiple form factors and relying on carrier stores to sell their phones, and I don’t think that was going to revolutionize anything.

Re: It's the “hardware”, stupid

#89

Post by kgwgk »

gregmac wrote: post #64
_vaporwave_ wrote: post #17

> The iPhone wasn't successful because of its beautiful design. It was because it packed everything we needed every day—phone calls, music, internet, photos, maps—into a single device. Have to disagree here. There were many devices before (and after) the iPhone that offered this package but it stands above the rest because of its design and polish.

When I first saw the iPhone I remember thinking how silly it was that a device calling itself a "phone" only had the phone function as of many apps. Other phones had internet and other features, sure, but their "home" screen, so to speak, was a phone UI. You had to hit "Menu" or something else to see the other apps, which were clearly secondary to the primary phone function. The iPhone felt more like a general portab…

> Other phones had internet and other features, sure, but their "home" screen, so to speak, was a phone UI. You had to hit "Menu" or something else to see the other apps, which were clearly secondary to the primary phone function.

There were also other “phones” that only had the phone function as one of many apps.

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