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Comment by seydor | Hacker News Reader

I would bet it will be called "The Dramamaker"

> will be capable of being fully aware of a user’s surroundings and life, will be unobtrusive, able to rest in one’s pocket or on one’s desk,

Sounds an awful lot like the phone. But it s not a phone. But people forget that a tool with the form factor of a phone has been man's best friend for millenia: it was a knife, a purse, a notebook, and now a phone. They are not going to beat that , is my bet. If it can be integrated in a phone, it's a phone

> a third core device a person would put on their desk after a MacBook Pro and an iPhone.

That's my car keys. now i will have to charge them too?

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You see, nobody wants their phone listening to them all the time. But a third core device? That’s different!

You’re going to love it!

Tech elite continue to be completely out of touch about what people actually want.

They know people don't want it, they just hope to be able to convince them otherwise because right now OpenAI is a feature, and not a product. The real money is in owning a product platform and so executives are forced to pitch some product idea to continue working there.

It is kind of interesting to note that the 1 thing tech was able to successfully get us to add to things we carry with us was the phone.

And that had prior signals that we would accept that: basically every household in the US had a phone. Cordless phones gained popularity. Beepers were a thing. We knew people wanted phones with them, we just couldn't do it yet.

The odds of creating a brand new device that no one has ever heard of that people will carry everywhere with them is basically zero.

the iPod / Walkman are there as well, but definitely less ubiquitous

> The odds of creating a brand new device that no one has ever heard of that people will carry everywhere with them is basically zero.

If there is enough utility in the device, and the form factor is well done, I think the odds are much higher than zero.

People already have a phone, and aren't going to carry around two tech gadgets. So either this thing does everying a phone can, in which case it's a phone (but it sounds like it doesn't have a screen, so it isn't), or it doesn't, in which case it fails.

I believe it was Kurzweil who had the quip that only novel utility differences drive rapid mass adoption.

The reason mobile devices scaled so rapidly is that calling a specific person (wherever they are) is so much more useful than calling a physical location.

If OpenAI wants to create a successful device, it needs to have that utility delta over an existing smartphone.

(While Google and Apple throw not insignificant resources into competing, with the help of mature mobile ecosystems)

> The reason mobile devices scaled so rapidly is that calling a specific person (wherever they are) is so much more useful than calling a physical location.

True, and then the next revolution was smartphones, with the iPhone being the first.

Steve Job's product launch highlighted the huge utility delta, which made all prior "feature phones" obsolete overnight.

"We're introducing THREE new products: a phone, a music player, and an internet communications device" ... which of course was 3-in-1 - the iPhone.

Raising the bar now becomes extremely difficult because the smartphone is a general purpose internet/wifi connected computer, chock full of sensors from cameras to microphone, etc. Now with local AI-acceleration as well.

What can a new device do that a general purpose computer in your pocket cannot?

Yeah, LOL it definitely won't be AR like this with compute in the cloud:

https://arstechnica.com/google/2025/05/glass-redux-google-ai...

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