[HarHarVeryFunny]

I totally agree - the phone as a form factor is not going away. People are always going to want to have a mobile communicator/computer, and want one with a screen and all-day battery life. The phone is not going to be replaced by smart glasses or some other wearable or screen-less pocket device.

It may well be that the user interface of your "phone", and how you use it, changes over time as we progress toward AGI, but as long as Apple keep to the Job's aesthetic of making well designed products that get out of the way and just "do the thing", they should be fine. Of course Apple will eventually fall, as all companies do, but I don't think the reason for it will be that the "phone" market was rendered obsolete by AI.

Perhaps if phones becomes more of a "pocket assistant" than a device to run discrete apps, then they will becomes harder to differentiate based on software, and more of a generic item rather than a status/luxury one ... who knows? Anyone else have any theories of how Apple may eventually fall?

There is one potential AI risk to Apple, that they are at a disadvantage due to not having their own frontier models and datacenters to run them on, but I think there will always be someone willing to sell them API access, and they will adapt as needed. Good enough AI is only going to get cheaper to train and serve, and Apple not trying to compete in this area may well turn out to have been a great decision, just as Microsoft seem to be doing fine letting OpenAI take all the risk.

[JumpCrisscross]

> the phone as a form factor is not going away

It's not going away in the next few years. Which means Apple doesn't have to rush to release an AI product for the sake of it à la Giannandrea.

[SoftTalker]

That's really the point of the article. As long as the phone is the (or at least a significant) conduit for our use of AI technology, Apple is in a good spot, and it's the same spot where they have historically done very well.

[fuzzfactor]

>want to have a mobile communicator/computer, and want one with a screen and all-day battery life.

Well before the iPhone flew off the shelf, using the the previously established smartphones I never had to settle for less than a week of battery life.

Plus anybody could just slap in another spare battery whenever they wanted to, whether they were off the grid for an extended period or not.

Never thought it was going to end, only get better not worse.

[HarHarVeryFunny]

Perhaps, but it still amazes me that something like an iPhone with a GHz processor blasting pixels to the screen all day, can run on a wafer thin battery (Mr. Creosote reference for the cognoscenti) for a full day.

Given that humans sleep at night, recharging the phone at night is a reasonable price to pay for the benefit of a smartphone vs flip phone, but a device that needed charging during the day as well (e.g. due to a form factor with a tiny battery) would almost certainly be a product killer.

[enos_feedler]

I think the vision of pocket assistant versus discrete apps is very much Apple. Remember the original iPhone had no app store. The app store is kind of a pain to deal with. If I had to bet, this starts with Apple pivoting Swift Playground into Playground releasing it across all devices. The programming language becomes invisible. The live canvas is the document.