Plan is to reinvent the smartphone with AI, in the same way the touchscreen on the iPhone reinvented the smartphone.
Particularly interesting given ChatGPTs latest move to have voice recognition and an AI voice respond. If you haven’t tried it, it’s kind of neat. This morning I had a conversation with ChatGPT with my phone in my pocket, all done overy Bluetooth headphones like I was on a call. It was actually a lot more natural then I expected. I wonder what it would look like if that kind of tech was front and center in a smartphone.
I’ve included a few snippets from the article below, but the TLDR is, big names and big money are behind brainstorming plans to make an AI first centered smartphone, a plan to reinvent the form factor. The article also points to declining smartphone sails as evidence that the public is tired of the same old slab every year, so this could be an interesting time for this to come out.
I guess it’s relevant to mention whatever the fuck the Humane AI pin is: The Humane Ai Pin makes its debut on the runway at Paris Fashion Week https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/30/23897065/humane-ai-pin-coperni-paris-fashion-week
From the article: After rumors began to swirl that Apple alum Jony Ive and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman were having collaborative talks on a mysterious piece of AI hardware, it appears that the pair are indeed trying to corner the smartphone market. The two are reportedly discussing a collaboration on a new kind of smartphone device with $1 billion in backing from Masayoshi Son’s Softbank.
…according to the outlet, the duo are looking to create a device that provides a more “natural and intuitive way” to interact with AI. The nascent idea is to take a ground-up approach to redesigning the smartphone in the same way that Ive did with touchscreens so many years ago. One source told the Financial Times that the plan is to make the “iPhone of artificial intelligence.” Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son is also involved in the venture, with the financial holding group putting up a massive $1 billion toward the effort. Son has also reportedly pitched Arm, a chip designer in which SoftBank has a 90% stake, for involvement.
While it’s still not clear what the end goal of the product talks will be (or if anything will come of them at all, really), it does seem like the general public has become fatigued with the same-y rollout of a slightly better smartphone slab year after year. Tech market analysis firm Canalys revealed in a report earlier this month that smartphone sales have experienced a significant decline in North America. The report indicates that iPhone sales have fallen 22% year-over-year, with an expected decline of 12% in 2023. The numbers are pretty staggering, especially fresh off the release of the iPhone 15, and could be an indicator that people are getting fatigued of the hottest new tech gadgets.
Must be nice to be able to throw money and things like this.
The reason smart phone sales have dropped — in my armchair point of view — is that everyone has a cell phone already, and the normal person doesn’t need to update their phone every year. I feel like I’m a pretty technical dude, but I still have a iPhone 12Pro because it still runs everything worth using. And it’s still fast. It’s less that I’m tired of this form factor, and more that I literally don’t need a new phone. And I feel like that’s most people most of the time.
They should’ve jumped on the modular phone idea. We don’t need a new phone every year but we could probably be talked into a new camera; a new processor; a new screen; a new antenna; etc etc
“The new antenna upgrades your wifi speed by 3%” and people would be lining up to snap that fancy new mod in.
I don’t think that is big - no one buys tower PCs anymore where you already can do that sort of thing, because there actually isn’t a benefit to upgrading most parts anymore. I am still using my android phone from 2019 because it literally does everything I could want a phone to do. I may be lacking vision, but I also don’t really see what AI is going to do here to change the form factor. The reason the slab has endured IMO is that it is a swiss army knife of the pocket computing device. You don’t want to go back toa phone with a tiny screen and just talk at AI because that’s a terrible web browser ui. It’s a terrible book or comic reading ui. It’s a terrible gaming ui. It’s bad for displaying chat, pictures, videos etc.
AI will probably help voice to text and vice versa so we can talk text instead of making a phone call better. I can see it helping anytime you don’t want to go into your phone, but I also see it as a new interface roughly like Siri. And no one thought that Siri was the iPhone of anything.
I just don’t think AI first makes sense. Everyone wants the Star Trek computer until they actually try and use it by talking at a computer. It’s just not efficient imo.
Project Ara was one of the most disappointing abandoned Google products.
it happened with desktops and laptops, now it’s happened with smartphones
I’m still on an XS Max, and the only reason I’m upgrading to the 15 is because I want 120hz… and more space. …and better cameras in low-light for cat pictures.
My XS Max is still extremely fast, which boggles my mind. It’s five years old. Original battery, and it lasts all day. Bonkers.
AI has some legitimate applications but I feel like this is like a mirror of the “PUT BLOCKCHAIN IN EVERYTHING” hype
Just be glad they’ve moved onto a new obsession and that video card prices are finally coming down.
Just wait till you find out how AIs are trained/ran
A list of business fads in the tech world, from what I remember:
- Personal computers
- Multimedia
- Networks: Internet, E-mail, World Wide Web, all the stupid names for it like cyberspace, information superhighway.
- Web 2.0: AJAX and the long tail, user generated content, democratized information exchange and discovery without gatekeepers
- Social Media
- The Cloud
- Mobile Apps
- Blockchain, cryptocurrency, decentralized finance, smart contracts, Web 3.0, NFTs
- VR, AR, XR
- Generative AI, LLMs, GANs, Deep Learning, etc.
It’s a good list but the blockchain line really jumps out at me for being almost 100% hype and based around a largely useless technology. The rest were real advancements that maybe had a ridiculous hype cycle before settling into an unspectacular but useful phase.
And what about a phone UX thats edited with config files? Let me customize my phone, you handle the hardware I can’t produce.
This article makes it seem like Ive was the design lead for the iPhone’s revolutionary UX. But he was mostly heading up industrial design at that time.
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When Apple put him in charge of UX, they ended up having to slowly undo everything he changed. Unreadably thin typefaces, buttons you couldn’t tell were buttons, etc.
iOS still looks a lot more like 7 than 6. Android, Windows, MacOS also do too. Maybe his design was too much too fast, but the industry definitely went that way.
It sure gives confidence when you call your product
{foo} for {bar}.At least we’ll get a delightfully stunted Jony Ive product film out of it.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
After rumors began to swirl that Apple alum Jony Ive and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman were having collaborative talks on a mysterious piece of AI hardware, it appears that the pair are indeed trying to corner the smartphone market.
Financial Times reported on the development, claiming that Ive and Altman had brainstorming sessions at the former’s San Francisco studio about what a consumer piece of hardware could look like.
Tech market analysis firm Canalys revealed in a report earlier this month that smartphone sales have experienced a significant decline in North America.
OpenAI tapping Jony Ive means the company is serious about developing an innovative new piece of tech as the British creator was the lead designer of Apple’s most famous gadgets like the iPhone, iPad, and iMac.
Ive served as Apple’s Chief Design Officer before eventually leaving the tech giant in 2019 to pursue other ventures after 27 years at the company.
While Ive certainly had a major hand in reshaping the technological landscape of the 21st century, he’s recently appeared to be ruminating on what kind of Pandora’s Box he’s truly opened.
The original article contains 550 words, the summary contains 184 words. Saved 67%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
So, like regular AI but with only one button?
I’m looking forward to this. I’m like Jony Ive’s design thinking. I think he brings a non tech way of thinking about tech into design that feels so approachable.
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I don’t like how he often sacrifices usability for aesthetics. Only having two ports on a Macbook, thin iPhones with no headphone jack, etc were said to be his designs.
