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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

#91

Post by CharlieDigital »

I think the mistake a lot of companies are making with their approach to AI is making AI some "other" interface that you have to interact with explicitly. This chat bot approach is only one paradigm for using AI and it's probably the worst one in most use cases.

Amazon Rufus, for example, falls into this category and it's hard to even remember to engage with it. On the other hand, Amazon is happy to serve me absolute trash search results.

What most people probably want is an AI that can, for example, help organize their calendar transparently. Have a meeting coming up with a client? What if the AI can use tools to go find the latest info about the client? Check their LinkedIn, check their X, check their blog, research their company, give you a tear sheet on topics to discuss based on this in the calendar notes. If a user has to directly interact and instruct the AI, it feels like it defeats the purpose.

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

#92

Post by aithrowawaycomm »

It has been especially frustrating to read about Apple Intelligence on my 2022 iPhone with iOS Safari, where some JavaScript bugs that have been around since 2012 seem to be slightly worse in the latest update, and occasionally the entire app just freezes for no good reason, even if I've closed all other tabs. Not to mention how often I have to reset my entire 2021 iPad because the audio drivers get into a bad state.

I suppose "stability improvements in WebKit" doesn't do much for Apple's stock price compared to SiriGPT. But this is feeling like death-by-1000-cuts: I don't think users are deeply committed to Apple UX/etc. I believe Apple's US market dominance is largely due to burnt fingers around Android's unreliability and annoyances between 2010-2020 (e.g. Google and Samsung not playing nice, badly orchestrated version changes). This was never a permanent state of affairs; Android has stabilized significantly and is more harmonized among competing manufacturers, while retaining its advantages on price and ease of development.

Apple seems complacent on the basics, and is overextending into an AI product few users seem to want.

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

#93

Post by yreg »

iscrewyou wrote: post #73
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.

It’s a package of devices Apple is selling. They sell under powered smaller screen macs. They sell iMacs. They sell small iPads. They sell smaller watches. Some of these just don’t sell as well as their other offerings. They should sell small phones. Because the whole family will be in on the brand, features, and services. I’ve heard many family members and friends say that they won’t give up their older small phones…

How can you be confident in this when you don't even see their sales data?

Still, I would like to see a smaller regularly updated phone. Bonus points if there is a high-end version, because small shouldn't mean budget (like with iPhone SE).

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

#95

Post by crustaceansoup »

candiddevmike wrote: post #59
mondobe wrote: post #3

I 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.

Changing to Gemini broke all of my smart home commands. Keeps trying to search/LLM how to turn off kitchen lights.

It also sometimes asks to unlock my phone for commands that plain old Assistant was happy to do while locked. I haven't really found it useful at all yet, free ChatGPT is just better than free Gemini for "LLM stuff" and Google Assistant is better for "smart home stuff"

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

#96

Post by neither_color »

brtkdotse wrote: post #2

Never mind AI, I just want Siri to have better text-to-speech quality than my freaking vacuum cleaner.

I have a bunch of "premium" smart outlets(eve energy, some are "THREAD" enabled, all the bells and whistles) all named and connected to things I want to toggle with voice: a small radiator, an air purifier, a humidifier, some accent lamps, a fan, an infrared therapy lamp etc. -Before anyone asks, I ordered the European version of their energy strip for higher wattage stuff-. I give each one a clear and unambiguous name, and still, at least one in ten times Siri will be confused about what I'm asking and turn off EVERY SINGLE OUTLET IN THE ROOM. It's endlessly frustrating. For what it's worth the outlets never de-sync or disconnect like the random amazon ones do so I blame it purely on Siri.

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

#97

Post by fhd2 »

xvector wrote: post #39
behnamoh wrote: post #19

I've been trying the iOS Beta 18.2 and here's my impression of Apple Intelligence: It's not bad, it's really really bad. The image clean-up feature is utterly useless, and I think it's one of the areas where we can clearly see the difference between a company for whom Generative AI is an afterthought (Apple), and the competition. I paid $1500 for the new iPhone Pro Max and a great part of the deal was the Apple Intel…

Apple has always sucked in AI and they have never formed the culture necessary to enable and attract top ML talent. They developed Siri years ago and have stagnated since. As far as the future of compute goes, Meta seems like it has a much more compelling argument with the Orion glasses and their investment in AI.

They didn't even develop Siri, they acquired it. Doesn't seem like they've done all that much with it beyond integrating and marketing it, but I could be wrong.

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

#98

Post by tra3 »

vvladymyrov wrote: post #62
tra3 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 usage…

Oh boy I hope that doesn’t happen to me. It took them a week to get iPhone 13 mini battery in.

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

#99

Post by michaelt »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #47
xvector wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Everyday AI" hasn't even been built yet tbh. Where is my assistant that notices my flight has been delayed and reschedules my appointments and lets my contacts know?

I think your example highlights why this kind of "everyday AI" would be nearly impossible. If my phone automatically rescheduled my appointments and notified my contacts, without my explicit direction, I would be pissed as all hell. There are some "confirmation" notifications that could assist here ("We noticed your flight is delayed - would you like to reschedule these appointments?"), but even then, I'd say the maj…

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?

Seems to me the problems are (1) the "assistants" aren't anywhere near good enough to be trusted to make the right decisions, and (2) a trustworthy assistant isn't compatible with the adtech business model, so it's unlikely facebook or google would produce such a thing.

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

#100

Post by tra3 »

efficax wrote: post #24
tra3 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

there are dozens of us! dozens!!! i’m also keeping my 13 mini until it’s dead

I’ll upgrade the second a new mini comes out…but I’m keeping it for now.
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