This is a huge threat to Apple. Who wants to use apps to send messages, check the weather, stock price, set reminders and so on, when you have a human-like assistant conversing with you, and can do all that and more? "Apps" are now a quaint tech from the 2000s.
Sam Altman is a person to doesn't actually do anything that would be considered actual work by people who do actual work (like me), so of course he is going to find a natural language interface the best he's ever used, because it mimics what he does every day, which is to tell other people to go do actual work.
Also, he has a stake in promoting his products, so what everything comes out of his mouth is dead on arrival as far as meaningful content, relevance, and veracity.
Speech is not an optimal interface (in most cases). The AI just rambles along and there's so much time wasted waiting for it to get to the point.
In reality, I think we're quite a few generations away from being able to go without a screen (as the Humane Pin has demonstrated) - and I'm sure Apple will be ready with a better AI Pin when the time comes. For the time being, this sits very nicely on an iPhone.
I feel like every time I see one of these claims about AI now, whatever's being predicted becomes reality a few weeks later.
For example, if you ask your AI assistant to book airport parking, flights, transfers, activities, and a hotel for a holiday, it'll be a long while (if ever?) before you trust it so much to let it pay for those things without a sense-check first.
And visual checks will be a magnitude faster than it reading everything out to you.
Edit: and just to be clear, by 'generations' I was meaning tech generations (i.e. of phones, or GPTs) not humans!
The Watch is a very obvious one imho - it's a fashion item, tracks your health and it's always handy when you need to look at it or talk to it. iPhone might be mostly replaced by the Watch but still some people really like to take photos or dislike wearing watches. And the iPad is hard to replace as a multimedia and gaming device.
You might be right about the Mac - which is why I didn't talk about it.
Also I won't trust ChatGPT to manage my money, be a remote control, be my MFA tool, play games or anything else that requires constant hands-on manipulation or authorization/etc.
Apps are here to stay - did you ditch your steering wheel when Tesla announced full self driving?