Are phones getting boring? How Apple, Google and Samsung are...
The tech giants can no longer rely on booming sales of new devices. Could the advent of AI be enough to spark a smartphone resurgence?
In retrospect, it feels like everyone rushed out to buy the first iPhone. But they didn’t, of course: in its first year, 2007, Apple shipped just 1.4 million iPhones, compared to 231.8 million sold last year. Some reviews were scathing, complaining that it would break quickly and lacked key features.
Not everybody who was down on the new phone was wrong. It was then astonishingly expensive – the cheapest model cost $499, though today’s models cost about twice that. It didn’t have apps, or video, or 3G, and its speed was incredibly limited. But, very quickly, the world was convinced, not just about the iPhone, but about smartphones generally.
The Annual Smartphone Cycle
As summer comes to an end, we find ourselves right in the middle of the annual cycle’s high point: Samsung and Google have released their new devices, and Apple is due to in a couple of weeks.
Each year, those companies take to their stages and reveal a whole load of new devices. But each year they have come to feel a little less unique: as smartphones have matured, they have become a little more predictable, and so have the annual upgrades.
It can at times feel like every company had been working towards a dream that’s now here: a smart, thin, and robust slab, with cameras on one side and a display on the other, with people’s whole digital lives squished into it.
The Role of Artificial Intelligence (AI)
But, this year, all three of the big phone companies and many more besides had a new plan to engage people with their devices: artificial intelligence. They all showed off various versions of that technology – both in the form of software updates and new hardware – to try and make people’s lives easier.
The new Pixel, for instance, is in its “Gemini era”, according to Google, in reference to the branding that the company has given its artificial intelligence tools. It will use AI to organize screenshots, let you generate entirely new images or place yourself into them, for instance.
Apple chose to brand its own AI tools as “Apple Intelligence”, but they were based on many of the same ideas. It will summarize notifications, let you create new Memoji, and allow Siri to become both more understanding and more useful.
Apple had long resisted using the words artificial intelligence: originally, it tended just to describe the features rather than how they worked, then used the actually more useful term “machine learning”, before being pushed by investors and the media into using the word AI, albeit with a different word hiding behind those initials.
The Evolving Smartphone Features
What’s notable about many of these new features is that they don’t aim to make people spend more time with their phones – the marketing, at least, is focused on ensuring that people can enjoy their lives, not their devices.
Device manufacturers know that we have anxiety about our connection to our devices. In 2018, for instance, both Apple and Google introduced new features intended to encourage people to use their devices less, by tracking how much time was spent in apps and encouraging people to switch them off.
That headset was perhaps a recognition also that the maturity of the smartphone has led to a new focus on what might come next. Rival companies have attempted to suggest that the AI revolution will not be brought about by shoving artificial intelligence into our existing devices but by making whole new ones.
That might be the central problem occupying all device manufacturers today: if people have a complaint about their smartphones, it is that they are too interesting, and so improvements aimed at making them even more thrilling represent both a promise and a threat.
Despite everything, we continue to like our phones – but that won’t stop some of the world’s biggest companies trying to make us fall in love with them all over again this year, with the help of AI.
