I very much do care if my phone understands my questions accurately when I ask them, and doesn't return irrelevant results, though. Nobody says "yeah Siri is crap, but have you seen that power usage?!".
They usually use their phones to speak to other people, hence why signal reception and battery life is one of the most important things I look for.
All ML gimmicks are nice to show off at events, pub gatherings and in reviews videos("hey look at what my new phone can do, yeah it looks the same as the one from last year and the year before, but can your phone do THIS? <insert ML gimmick of swapping people's heads in the picture>"), but won't help me if the signal reception quality sucks and drains my battery.
Phones need to work good as phones first and foremost. High-end compute abilities come second.
My most used ML gimmick is ChatGPT which doesn't run on device anyway, nor is it something I need in case of emergency like you know... being able to call someone to come pick me up/help pe when I need it the most.
So IMHO bad modems like the ones in Pixel phones, are inexcusable in a phone no matter how fancy the other features are.
Counterpoint – I haven't met many people who use their phones to speak to other people. YMMV.
But texting is also a form of speaking to people although not using your mouth.
And for those apps to serve their purpose (excepting the likes of Candy Crush and Genshin Impact) what do those apps need? Internet connectivity right? Which is received via the same modem as the calls, right?
So a sucky modem will negatively impact battery life and app usage in challenging environments just as much or even more as call capabilities, right?
Am I close?
The confusion was probably just about saying it's a phone first. I'm in my mid 30s as well and the only time I call someone is when I contact my mother. I think with the younger generation it's at a point where calling someone is seen as intrusive.
If you are calling me you are taking my choice away on when to deal with whatever you've got. Or at least are interrupting me with the attempt itself. So it better be important.
Won't work where I live now in south-centeal Europe (Austria ) where everything is archaic and most services are still done via phone calls like in the past: appointments for plumbers, doctors, recruiter call-backs to job applications, etc.
Almost none of those services here use email or apps as the default, everyone seems to prefer sync communication so they first tries to reach you on phone. If you don't answer or call back they'll assume you're ghosting them and don't need the appointment/service anymore and you'll miss out on important issues. Sometimes they'll leave a voicemail telling you to call them back when you can, so you can never really escape calls here without emigrating.
You can say we both live in completely different bubbles but the existence of one does not invalidate the other.
Probably not an issue if you're all the time in cities with great coverage but you'll feel it when you go in "the woods" or well shielded buildings or basements.
Love Austria btw., and appreciate the preciseness of your language. It's been years since I worked with it, but it always felt like a vacation for my brain, while consuming technical content in it
I'm not Austrian, I'm an immigrant here, and it's not "my language" nor anyone else's I presume, it's still just German, albeit with an Arnold Schwarzenegger accent on top.
I would LOVE to be able to voice control the various aspects of my phone but it's so mind numbingly frustrating that I'm annoyed just thinking about it. If it was better I would sacrifice other features for it.
Our google home basically sits there all day waiting for my wife to say "play abba", she has a strong non-English accent and it's about the only thing it seems to pick up. Don't get me on cars where I have to say the exact sentence to do anything.
That we're accepting apps so bad that we normalized the workflow of the only way to extract text from them is screenshots and OCR.
Can you imagine having to deal with this shit on PCs as well?
On PCs we have Windows with candy crush ads, so I can indeed imagine.
We had great OCR in $50 printer-scanner combo devices for home users and those didn't have M1 chips but some dirt cheap HW and Windows software to do the OCR(most likely using the Tesseract library which runs on a toaster).
So the everyday need for ML in everything in our lives is greatly exaggerated.
> All ML gimmicks are nice to show off at events, pub gatherings and in reviews videos
with a specific example of how it is useful to me outside of the cases you mention. I am merely sharing my experience.
P.S. I wish Tesseract worked as well as you mention today on my >50$ pc. I am not an Apple fanboy but OCR for images is flawless.
But that wasn't my main point. Similar to Tesla popularizing ML-driven self parking, which doesn't work any better than the PID/Kalman filter methods already in use by others for the past 10+ years, my point was that today we're seemingly shoehorning ML into solving problems that have already been solved by "boring" traditional engineering solutions for over 10 years now, just to feed the AI product hype, similar to the digital camera megapixel race, or other such nonsense that offered no measurable upgrade in quality but looked good on product stickers to move merchandise at higher prices.