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Comment by davidklemke | Hacker News Reader

"Circle to Search is launching January 31 on select premium Android smartphones — the Pixel 8, Pixel 8 Pro and the new Samsung Galaxy S24 series"

Well that's a little disappointing, I was expecting at least 2 generations of Pixel devices would get it. Wonder how long it'll be before it makes its way to other handsets.

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Is it just for pushing the sales of these newer models? Because you'd still have to use Google lens (though more tighter integration), but it's not intrinsic to a new hardware (gpu or cpu) at all.

I like how overly underwhelming this year apple and Samsung flagship products are. The 1 year release cadence seems to hit a point where no fundamental new changes were to be added.

It's 100% for pushing the Samsung phones, the whole galaxy unpacked event theme was "Galaxy AI."

Everyone I know has gone from upgrading every 1 or 2 years to 4+ years, including myself. Phones are much more expensive and iterations are fairly minimal, but over a 4+ year span it's pretty significant. I'm going from an S20 Ultra to S24 Ultra this year and excited for the better display, cooling, cameras, and having a stylus I can use for small pixel arty stuff without lugging my massive ipad around.

The same holds true for apple. I had an iPhone 11 that I finally broke, and the 15 is the first phone with a really significant change (lighting to usb-c). I had a 6 before the 11. OTOH, I’m a minimalist user, so maybe a lot changed between versions and it’s stuff I turn off. I spend <3h a day on my phone, it’s mostly for texting and phone calls.

Samsung at least indicated that "many" of the AI features they announced for the S24 series will also be made available on earlier flagship devices (including but possibly not limited to the S23 series, Fold5, Flip5 and Tab S9) once they get the OneUI 6.1 update. It's not currently clear exactly which features are included in that "many" though.

https://www.androidauthority.com/samsung-one-ui-6-1-galaxy-a...

Which really feels discordant with the claim that all this stuff is only enabled by the new AI-specialized hardware. I say this as someone who owns a Pixel 8 Pro - love the phone, but am utterly disillusioned with these AI claims.

Yeah, a lot of it is ultimately offloaded to the cloud and the hardware is effectively just a license key that grants you access to those API endpoints. Googles Magic Eraser was originally a cloud service, but they eventually got it working on-device with the Pixel 8 series, but they simultaneously launched Magic Editor which the Pixel 8 still defers to the cloud.

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