[AOsborn]

Good points - but I fundamentally disagree here.

The whole ecosystem, culture and metaphor of having a 'device' with 'apps' is to enable access to a range of solutions to your various problems.

This is all going to go away.

Yes, there will always be exceptions and sometimes you need the physical features of the device - like for taking photos.

Instead, you'll have one channel which can solve 95% of your issues - basically like having a personalised, on-call assistant for everyone on the planet.

Consider the friction when consumers grumble about streaming services fragmenting. They just want one. They don't want to subscribe to 5+.

In 10 years, kids will look back and wonder why on earth we used to have these 'phones' with dozens or hundreds of apps installed. 'Why would you do that? That is so much work? How do you know which you need to use?'

If there was one company worrying about change, I would think it would actually be Apple. The iPhone has long been a huge driver of sales and growth - as increasing performance requirements have pushed consumers to upgrade. Instead, I think the increasing relevance of AI tools will inverse this. Consumers will be looking for smaller, lighter, harder-wearing devices. Why do you need a 'phone' with more power? You just need to be able to speak to the AI.

[guyomes]

An interface based on voice only has an issue: people tend to not live alone. As children they live with their parents. As adult, many want to live with a significant other.

Having somebody else in the house speaking out loud each time they want infos from the internet could become annoying.

Apart from having a mind reading device, I don't see so far a solution to this problem better than text input with a physical keyboard or a virtual keyboard on the device.

[vineyardmike]

> Consider the friction when consumers grumble about streaming services fragmenting. They just want one. They don't want to subscribe to 5+.

I think you just proved it won't happen anytime soon.

Consumers obviously would prefer a "unified" interface. Yet we can't even get streaming services to all expose their libraries to a common UI - which is already built into Apple TV, fireTv, Roku, and Chromecast. Despite the failure of the streaming ecosystem to unify, you expect every other software service to unify the interfaces?

I think we'll see more features integrated into the operating system of devices, or integrated into the "Ecosystem" of our devices - first maps was an app, then a system app, now calling an uber is supported in-map, and now Siri can do it for you on an iPhone. But I think it's a long road to integrate this universally.

> If there was one company worrying about change, I would think it would actually be Apple.

I agree that apple has the most to lose. Google (+Assistant/Bard) has the best opportunity here (but they'll likely squander it). They can easily create wrappers around services and expose them through an assistant, and they already have great tech regarding this. The announcement of Duplex was supposed to be just that for traditional phone calls.

Apple also has a great opportunity to build it into their operating system, locally. Instead of leaning into an API-first assistant model, they could use an assistant to topically expose "widgets" or views into existing on-device apps. We already see bits of it in iMessages, on the Home Screen, share screen and my above Maps example. I think the "app" as a unit of distribution of code is a good one, and here to stay, and the best bet is for an assistant to hook into them and surface embedded snippets when needed. This preserves the app company's branding, UI, etc and free's apple from having to play favorite.

Edit: apple announcing LLM optimizations already indicates they want this to run on apple silicon not the cloud.

[AOsborn]

Great point about failure to unify (or intentionally preventing it).

The space is in a land-grab phase, where everyone wants to position themselves as the next Google, and control the channel.

Will be interesting to see how this all plays out.

[s3p]

> In 10 years, kids will look back and wonder why on earth we used to have these 'phones' with dozens or hundreds of apps installed. 'Why would you do that? That is so much work? How do you know which you need to use?'

Phones with apps have been around for 29 years. I'm calling BS on your prediction now.