The onrushing AI era was supposed to create boom times for great gadgets. Not long ago, analysts were predicting that Apple Intelligence would start a “supercycle” of smartphone upgrades, with tons of new AI features compelling people to buy them. Amazon and Google and others were explaining how their ecosystems of devices would make computing seamless, natural, and personal. Startups were flooding the market with ChatGPT-powered gadgets, so you’d never be out of touch. AI was going to make every gadget great, and every gadget was going to change to embrace the AI world.
This whole promise hinged on the idea that Siri, Alexa, Gemini, ChatGPT, and other chatbots had gotten so good, they’d change how we do everything. Typing and tapping would soon be passé, all replaced by multimodal, omnipresent AI helpers. You wouldn’t need to do things yourself; you’d just tell your assistant what you need, and it would tap into the whole world of apps and information to do it for you. Tech companies large and small have been betting on virtual assistants for more than a decade, to little avail. But this new generation of AI was going to change things.
There was just one problem with the whole theory: the tech still doesn’t work. Chatbots may be fun to talk to and an occasionally useful replacement for Google, but truly game-changing virtual assistants are nowhere close to ready. And without them, the gadget revolution we were promised has utterly failed to materialize.
In the meantime, the tech industry allowed itself to be so distracted by these shiny language models that it basically stopped trying to make otherwise good gadgets. Some companies have more or less stopped making new things altogether, waiting for AI to be good enough before it ships. Others have resorted to shipping more iterative, less interesting upgrades because they have run out of ideas other than “put AI in it.” That has made the post-ChatGPT product cycle bland and boring, in a moment that could otherwise have been incredibly exciting. AI isn’t good enough, and it’s dragging everything else down with it.
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I would argue that they moved to LLMs because they had run out of ideas on actually improving cellphones. It wasn’t that they were distracted by them. They are trying to distract us because they need to cell new phones every year and nothing they’ve come up with is really justifying shelling out $1200 for a phone that’s virtually the same as the previous 3-5 iterations.
This “new phone every year” is the worst consumer crapfest we have going. AI features feel like clutching at straws when seemingly everyone hates the battery life on every single phone. Slap a larger battery in there? Well now you get shit AI that burns whatever extra capacity was gained. I can’t name a single quality on an iPhone model from the last 6 years that I truly wanted, other than the size of my 13 mini. It works fine and it fits in my pocket. Now make one that stays on for a full 24 hours and doesn’t need a battery replacement every 2 years.
Blame the isheep for purchasing every crap offered.
Me breathing a sigh of relief for still using my S10.
It makes calls, send texts and I can read Lemmy with the app. What more do I need?
There are plenty on Android as well and they also existed before smartphones.
I’m not sure if that’s a typo or brilliant. They need to “cell” new phones every year, indeed.
Celling cell phones is indeed profitable.
I’ve been using a Sunbeam flip phone for a year or so. Paid for the phone up front, and pay $3/mo for use of maps, speech recognition, and continued bugfixes.
Even if phones never got new features, dev time still needs to be committed to security updates, and services (like Siri) need to be paid for. The model of getting 100% of your revenue from new phone sales is starting to break. If I could pay $3/mo for Siri or whatever and never have my phone go obsolete, I think that’d be a good deal.
What the heck are you on about. That’s the worst possible solution to this, are you some sort of masochistic?
If Siri is something that needs to be paid for, don’t bundle it with the system. Charge extra from the start, and people can opt in to that shit.
Also, they run a massively profitable software store, and THAT is what justifies and pays for the bug fixing and security patches to the overall OS.
The “cell a year” practice isn’t to cover development costs, it’s to bring in massive profit by milking the consumeristic herd that buys their crap.
It’s more boring than this, I think. The AI fomo is real, so they cram that in rather clumsy and ultimately pointless. But there were so many missed opportunities on Apple and Samsung flagships this year and it boils down to the capitalistic urge to save money and charge customers the same, and having no real competition. OPPO, one plus, vivo all have better devices, but importing them and getting them to work on US carriers is basically not possible. Not to mention the incentives the carriers throw at you to keep you locked in to that manufacturer.