Project Ara was one of the most disappointing Google abandoned products.
Comment on Jony Ive and OpenAI CEO Raise $1B to Design the 'iPhone of AI'
Transcendant@lemmy.world 1 year agoThey should’ve jumped on the modular phone idea. We don’t need a new phone every year but we could probably be talked into a new camera; a new processor; a new screen; a new antenna; etc etc
“The new antenna upgrades your wifi speed by 3%” and people would be lining up to snap that fancy new mod in.
Wisely@lemm.ee 1 year ago
jmp242@sopuli.xyz 1 year ago
I don’t think that is big - no one buys tower PCs anymore where you already can do that sort of thing, because there actually isn’t a benefit to upgrading most parts anymore. I am still using my android phone from 2019 because it literally does everything I could want a phone to do. I may be lacking vision, but I also don’t really see what AI is going to do here to change the form factor. The reason the slab has endured IMO is that it is a swiss army knife of the pocket computing device. You don’t want to go back toa phone with a tiny screen and just talk at AI because that’s a terrible web browser ui. It’s a terrible book or comic reading ui. It’s a terrible gaming ui. It’s bad for displaying chat, pictures, videos etc.
AI will probably help voice to text and vice versa so we can talk text instead of making a phone call better. I can see it helping anytime you don’t want to go into your phone, but I also see it as a new interface roughly like Siri. And no one thought that Siri was the iPhone of anything.
I just don’t think AI first makes sense. Everyone wants the Star Trek computer until they actually try and use it by talking at a computer. It’s just not efficient imo.
Transcendant@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Is this correct? Literally typing this from a ‘tower PC’. I would never buy anything else (I use my PC for writing music, a little animating, a lot of gaming). Almost every entry on the site I’ve bought my last 3 PCs & laptops from is a ‘tower PC’. I know not every PC user is a ‘power user’ but the idea that people don’t want to upgrade their PCs anymore is surely not correct? ‘There isn’t a benefit to upgrading most parts’ what, like a GPU? Or a CPU? Or RAM? Or going from an HDD to SSD? Or adding thunderbolt capability? I’d be surprised to find a majority of PC users weren’t upgrading any parts in a 3-year cycle.
Interested what phone you have. I persevered with a Samsung Galaxy S9 for many years but it was just feeling so slow & clunky even after a refresh & new battery. Got a Pixel 7a this year, blocked all the intrusive tracking, swapped the loader for a custom, it’s brilliant.
jmp242@sopuli.xyz 1 year ago
windowsreport.com/desktop-vs-laptop-market-share/ implies that desktops market share is shrinking, but it’s not as low as I thought it was. That said, many desktops I see out there in business (and at work) are “tiny” ones that you can’t upgrade either, they’re a laptop without the screen built in.
When I talk about a benefit to upgrading most parts, I mean that if you go buy say a general consumer model at Wal-Mart, you probably can’t just change out the CPU because the sockets change frequently. The RAM may have a spare slot, or be able to be increased in size, which is probably the most bang for your buck unless your PC happens to be a slow spinning disk. Most of the pre-built PCs have a PSU sized exactly for what’s in the box, and there usually isn’t a discrete GPU. Not only that, but there aren’t extra plugs, so you’re not plugging in a PCIe GPU without swapping out the PSU.
All things I’d imagine most computer buyers don’t or can’t do. They buy a box, and when it “dies” they buy a new box. I’ve only met PC Gamers online in the last … 15 years or so. Everyone else uses a console, phone, or gave up gaming.
No one I know upgrades PCs in a 3 year cycle and haven’t since the aughts. This is because high end PCs from 2010 worked straight through 2022 for people - Windows 11 is pushing new PCs, in so far as people care to upgrade / patch. Most people want the cheapest PC possible, which means they’re not upgrading anything till it breaks. And they upgrade the entire PC at a time.
As to the phone I have, I have a Xiaomi Mi 8 Lite from 2019. No desire to upgrade it till it dies.
dnick@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Maybe because you haven’t seen an AI first designed ‘anything’. I doubt they really have a sense of what it is either, but if they actually did take what is incorrectly, but popularly, phrased as ‘AI’ and built a personal communication platform from it, I think it would be different enough that you saying ‘it’s not worth it’ before having any sense of what it is, is premature in the most literal sense.
jmp242@sopuli.xyz 1 year ago
I mean, the claim is it’s going to revolutionize the cell phone like the iPhone did. I’m not saying how “worth it” it’ll be. I’m saying I don’t see it changing the form factor much, or the general way you might interact with your phone much. Maybe I’m reading too much into the iPhone part - the change from ever smaller flip phones or slide phones to kind of ever larger slab touchscreens.
It was obvious when you pulled out an iPhone in 2008 you had the new hotness. AI is mostly invisible - how do you make that a status symbol? People already voice interact with their phones, or type interact with their phones. Unless this AI is mind reading and mind writing, I’m not seeing how it’s going to be that interface sea change or visual style change. All the things I can see current AI helping with are entirely incremental in terms of using an interface.
VitoScaletta@lemmy.sdf.org 1 year ago
I think it might be good for older people or people who struggle with technology, depending on its complexity and integration with other stuff. I absolutely hate talking to my phone, but a lot of older people I know do almost everything via google assistant. I could see a lot of use for accessability, but I personally probably wouldn’t use it.