Hacker News Reader

Comment by RobinL | Hacker News Reader

Feels like Google is really pulling ahead of the pack here. A model that is cheap, fast and good, combined with Android and gsuite integration seems like such powerful combination.

Presumably a big motivation for them is to be first to get something good and cheap enough they can serve to every Android device, ahead of whatever the OpenAI/Jony Ive hardware project will be, and way ahead of Apple Intelligence. Speaking for myself, I would pay quite a lot for truly 'AI first' phone that actually worked.

View on HN

Apple Intelligence is going to be Gemini https://www.macrumors.com/2025/11/05/apple-siri-google-gemin...

That's too bad. Apple's most interesting value proposition is running local inference with big privacy promises. They wouldn't need to be the highest performer to offer something a lot of people might want.

Apple’s most interesting value proposition was ignoring all this AI junk and letting users click “not interested” on Apple Intelligence and never see it again.

From a business perspective it’s a smart move (inasmuch as “integrating AI” is the default which I fundamentally disagree with) since Apple won’t be left holding the bag on a bunch of AI datacenters when/if the AI bubble pops.

I don’t want to lose trust in Apple, but I literally moved away from Google/Android to try and retain control over my data and now they’re taking me… right back to Google. Guess I’ll retreat further into self-hosting.

I also agree with this. Microsoft successfully removed my entire household from ever owning one of their products again after this year. Apple and linux make up the entire delta.

As long as Apple doesn't take any crazy left turns with their privacy policy then it should be relatively harmless if they add in a google wrapper to iOS (and we won't need to take hard right turns with grapheneOS phones and framework laptops).

> Apple’s most interesting value proposition was ignoring all this AI junk

Did you forget all the Apple Intelligence stuff? They were never "ignoring" if anything they talked a big talk, and then failed so hard.

The whole iPhone 16 was marketed as AI first phone (including in billboards). They had full length ads running touting AI benefits.

Apple was never "ignoring" or "sitting AI out". They were very much in it. And they failed.

Sure. If by ignore you mean flaunt about Apple Intelligence only to fail miserably on the expectation they themselves generated.

My understanding is Apple will be hosting Gemini models themselves on the private compute system they announced a while back.

Pulling ahead? Depends on the usecase I guess. 3 turns into a very basic Gemini-CLI session and Gemini 3 Pro has already messed up a simple `Edit` tool-call. And it's awfully slow. In 27 minutes it did 17 tool calls, and only managed to modify 2 files. Meanwhile Claude-Code flies through the same task in 5 minutes.

Yeah - agree, Anthropic much better for coding. I'm more thinking about the 'average chat user' (the larger potential userbase), most of whom are on chatgpt.

Knowing Googles MO, its most likely not the model but their harness system that's the issue. God they are so bad at their UI and agentic coding harnesses...

I think Claude is genuinely much smarter, and more lucid.

My non-tech brother has the latest Google Pixel phone and he enthusiastically uses Gemini for many interactions with his phone.

I almost switched out of the Apple ecosystem a few months ago, but I have an Apple Studio monitor and using it with non-Apple gear is problematic. Otherwise a Pixel phone and a Linux box with a commodity GPU would do it for me.

What will you use the ai in the phone to do for you? I can understand tablets and smart glasses being able to leverage smol AI much better than a phone which is reliant on apps for most of the work.

I desperately want to be able to real-time dictate actions to take on my phone.

Stuff like:

"Open Chrome, new tab, search for xyz, scroll down, third result, copy the second paragraph, open whatsapp, hit back button, open group chat with friends, paste what we copied and send, send a follow-up laughing tears emoji, go back to chrome and close out that tab"

All while being able to just quickly glance at my phone. There is already a tool like this, but I want the parsing/understanding of an LLM and super fast response times.

is that faster to say than do, or is it an accessibility or while-driving need?

I don't understand that use case at all. How can you tell it to do all that stuff, if you aren't sitting there glued to the screen yourself?

Because typing on mobile is slow, app switching is slow, text selection and copy-paste are torture. Pretty much the only interaction of the ones OP listed is scrolling.

Plus, if the above worked, the higher level interactions could trivially work too. "Go to event details", "add that to my calendar".

FWIW, I'm starting to embrace using Gemini as general-purpose UI for some scenarios just because it's faster. Most common one, "<paste whatever> add to my calendar please."

This new model is absurdly quick on my phone and for launch day, wonder if it's additional capacity/lower demand or if this is what we can expect going forward.

On a related note, why would you want to break down your tasks to that level surely it should be smart enough to do some of that without you asking and you can just state your end goal.

This has been my dream for voice control of PC for ages now. No wake word, no button press, no beeping or nagging, just fluently describe what you want to happen and it does.

without a wake word, it would have to listen and process all parsed audio. you really want everything captured near the device/mic to be sent to external servers?

I might if that's what it takes to make it finally work. The fueling of the previous 15 years was not worth it, but that was then.

Apple tried this ages ago:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlainTalk

Analyse e-mails/text/music/videos, edit photos, summarization, etc.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com