Comment by HarHarVeryFunny | Hacker News Reader

Comment by HarHarVeryFunny | Hacker News Reader

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HarHarVeryFunny

> Apple doesn't need to solve AI. It's not core to their business

Perhaps, but it depends on what business they are really in...

One classic business failure ("Marketing Myopia") is to define the business you are in as the product or service you sell, rather than the customer need that you fill.

It's certainly been a long time since Apple was in the "phone business", and Nokia is an example of what happened to a company that thought that was the business they were in.

For now, AI is largely being packaged in a way that is somewhat orthogonal to what a smartphone does - as a service (e.g. AI chat) that it can consume - but as AI becomes more pervasive that will change, and it seems that increasingly the mobile device in your pocket will become more like your do-it-all personal assistant rather than a pocket computer that you use to run different applications do to different things.

So, do Apple think they are in the smartphone business, with AI as someone else's business, a service that their phones can consume, or are they correctly anticipating where things are heading?

My take is that the future will look something like this:

- You pay for a personal AI assistant from a cloud vendor (most people) or you run it yourself on your own hardware (not yet common, likely somewhat common in the future as hardware becomes cheaper and open weight models keep getting better). This assistant won't be a chatbot but an autonomous agent (like OpenClaw today). Some of these will be free but heavily subsidized through aggressive ads.

- This AI assistant has hooks into whatever personal services you want (email, cloud storage, photos, messages, etc.).

- You own a variety of devices in different form factors, each of which increasingly acts as a way of interacting with the same AI assistant, which exists independent of device. Some of these form factors will be new ones that don't meaningfully exist yet today, like true high-end AR glasses.

- Many apps and websites will eventually just become on-demand generative interfaces spawned by your AI assistant. Some "fixed" or "pre-programmed" interfaces will still exist, though.

For Apple, there are really two questions: (1) do they need to create their own frontier AI assistant to play a significant role in this future long-term? (2) if the answer to the former is "yes", when do they need that by, and how does it strategically weigh against creating the next generation of compute form factors that show up in the third item above?

Given that Apple has openly stated that they intend to create personalized intelligence across their ecosystem and that they don't know that the smartphone will be the dominant form factor in a decade, I think their answers are: (1) yes; (2) they need to have one eventually, but it's even more important that they prepare for next-gen form factors, and so they're okay being late to the game on AI assistants as long as they get there soon enough.

I'm personally not convinced about "next-gen form factors", although I know that's what many companies are focusing on - some type of smart glasses, or whatever kind of (screen-less?) device Jony Ive and OpenAI are working on.

Most people are too appearance and fashion-conscious to want to wear tech on their face, and I don't see many people wanting to carry TWO expensive tech gadgets (and worry about charging/losing/forgetting them), so, seeing as photos and video is core to what people want from their mobile device, it seems that the smartphone will continue to be the form-factor of the future, and I expect these other next-gen form factors to fail.

I think Apple's brand loyalty buys them some lead time in being a fast-follower, but the danger to them would be if things change so fast and profoundly that they get left behind a la Nokia. What if Google or someone else comes out with an AI-centric "personal assistant" device so compelling that it massively ups the bar as to what customers expect from a mobile device (in same way that iPhone did at launch)? I wouldn't expect it to kill Apple overnight, but it seems that they are in effect gambling that "we can always pay for AI if we have to", and "someone will always license it to run on-device if we need to".

Only the paranoid survive !

> Most people are too appearance and fashion-conscious to want to wear tech on their face

Have you seen the Ray Ban meta glasses? They already look pretty close to existing fashionable sunglasses, albeit with a visible camera.

> and I don't see many people wanting to carry TWO expensive tech gadgets (and worry about charging/losing/forgetting them)

They already do; plenty of people carry a smart phone, a smart watch, and airpods.

> seeing as photos and video is core to what people want from their mobile device, it seems that the smartphone will continue to be the form-factor of the future, and I expect these other next-gen form factors to fail.

People use smartphones to avoid being bored, but there are situations when it's unacceptable to use them (i.e. in a meeting); I could see smart glasses being used for that niche.

> What if Google or someone else comes out with an AI-centric "personal assistant" device so compelling that it massively ups the bar as to what customers expect from a mobile device (in same way that iPhone did at launch)?

Knowing Google, that personal assistant would probably be shut down within a year.

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