[xanderlewis]

Why would I want ‘AI’ on my iPhone anyway? All I want is an all-in-one electronic notepad, calculator, encyclopaedia, communicator, music player and camera. And it already does all of that (almost) perfectly. And has done for the last fifteen years.

[mingus88]

That’s it though. The iPhone set the paradigm for nearly 20 years. And up to that point nobody knew it was coming.

It’s been done and every tech company wants to find the next game changing thing.

I’m kinda rooting for Apple on this one. Give me a smarter smart phone that doesn’t sell out my privacy.

If they can do that and whatever AR or VR or whatever ends up finally being usable perhaps it will be built with user privacy back in mind. As it is I’m not getting anywhere near a Meta or a Google or an Amazon reality device

[xanderlewis]

I agree mostly, but what exactly do you mean by privacy?

I think the real pressing issue is not ‘privacy’ or ‘tracking’ or whatever; it’s having one’s views slowly but surely warped by AI-enabled mass disinformation campaigns and having one’s eyeballs taken hostage by whichever company pays enough to keep you watching. Half the world seems to now be addicted to short-form video slop/brainrot now, and they don’t even enjoy it!

That’s really the hallmark of addiction — you’re consciously aware that it’s completely pointless and detrimental to your life and yet you can’t put it down.

Perhaps the same was said of TV when it was new, but, looking at what the BBC used to broadcast as recently as twenty years ago, I’m shocked how far we’ve fallen. If Apple really wants to save the world, they should find a solution to this. Since (fairly uniquely) their business isn’t dependent on selling attention to advertisers, they might just have a shot.

[mingus88]

Privacy here means Apple is not a data broker. Your inference requests are completely anonymous.

Apple made their money when they sold an expensive bit of hardware. They even use some of these large margins to build out private compute cloud to make sure they never see what you send them

Frankly they are the only big tech company I will even remotely trust. The fact that their AI isn’t bleeding edge is a feature for me

[sitzkrieg]

apple's pro privacy stance is marketing

[jimbokun]

That's a huge, near existential threat for Apple.

If everyone's iPhones already do everything they want, the only reason to buy a new one is if the current one breaks. Which would decimate Apple's stock price.

[neepi]

We're already there. I only buy a new one every 2 years because they last so damn long that my three kids can get them handed down that long.

Just got rid of a 9 year old 6s a few months ago that still worked fine!

[ryandrake]

This is the real tragedy: That we have to throw away perfectly working phones because their manufacturer and the software ecosystem are working together to make sure our devices outlive the software on them.

[neepi]

The 6s still got an update earlier this year. I sold it to someone who was going to use it. It was just sitting around otherwise. So I'm not sure that's entirely true.

[jimbokun]

Eh.

Not sure you can fault Apple for stopping investment in software for devices past a certain age. And certain functionality just isn't supported by older hardware.

Doesn't mean the devices stop working. Just that Apple is saying you're on your own.

(Although the proprietary nature of Apple software means you also can't continue upgrading the software on your own or through a third party.)

[thewebguyd]

Yeah, especially considering how long they already are supported by Apple.

Sure it'd be nice to continue to be able to upgrade the software on out of support devices, but how long can we really expect a for profit company to support old stuff? I personally think 5 years is fine for a phone.

Time will tell what they do about apple silicon Macs though. The M1 is 5 years old now, and is still capable for pretty much all workloads if you have one with enough RAM. I could see it being still useful for 5+ more years. It's there I would expect at least 10 years of support, I think.

[xanderlewis]

You’re not wrong, but how does it relate to my question? I’m asking why I would want AI, not why Apple would want to artificially inject ‘AI’ into their product — that’s obvious.

[ryandrake]

I don't care if my products "have AI" in them.

I care that they do the tasks I command them to do, quickly and efficiently. If the developer achieves this using AI somehow, great. If the developer achieves this using traditional algorithms, also great. It doesn't even remotely matter to me if they are "using AI" any more than it matters whether they are "using Python."

[senko]

Want Siri to actually work?

[whateveracct]

i have disabled siri for well over a decade now

i don't need that sort of thing

[msgodel]

I never liked Siri but leaving Perplexity/ChatGPT in voice mode so I can just verbally ask for web searches etc while I'm doing other things is amazing. Something like that with MCP would actually be revolutionary.

[xanderlewis]

Agreed. Even if it worked perfectly, I’d rather just press a couple of buttons than have to speak to it. It’s just of no interest to me.

[taco_emoji]

No, I do not

[giancarlostoro]

My biggest concern is that it will degrade my phone sooner and its battery life. I rather just hit an LLM in the cloud somewhere from my phone.

If the tech ever reaches the point where Apple can fully do, on device-first and there's no issues with it, then they'll likely invest drastically into it.

[codexy]

Agree. AI features definitely eat up battery and processing power, even if they're not running 24/7.

[yb6677]

Local llm will allow offline connection (not all places in the world enjoy USA level internet coverage) and offer privacy.

And no network latency.