The onrushing AI era was supposed to create boom times for great gadgets. Not long ago, analysts were predicting that Apple Intelligence would start a “supercycle” of smartphone upgrades, with tons of new AI features compelling people to buy them. Amazon and Google and others were explaining how their ecosystems of devices would make computing seamless, natural, and personal. Startups were flooding the market with ChatGPT-powered gadgets, so you’d never be out of touch. AI was going to make every gadget great, and every gadget was going to change to embrace the AI world.
This whole promise hinged on the idea that Siri, Alexa, Gemini, ChatGPT, and other chatbots had gotten so good, they’d change how we do everything. Typing and tapping would soon be passé, all replaced by multimodal, omnipresent AI helpers. You wouldn’t need to do things yourself; you’d just tell your assistant what you need, and it would tap into the whole world of apps and information to do it for you. Tech companies large and small have been betting on virtual assistants for more than a decade, to little avail. But this new generation of AI was going to change things.
There was just one problem with the whole theory: the tech still doesn’t work. Chatbots may be fun to talk to and an occasionally useful replacement for Google, but truly game-changing virtual assistants are nowhere close to ready. And without them, the gadget revolution we were promised has utterly failed to materialize.
In the meantime, the tech industry allowed itself to be so distracted by these shiny language models that it basically stopped trying to make otherwise good gadgets. Some companies have more or less stopped making new things altogether, waiting for AI to be good enough before it ships. Others have resorted to shipping more iterative, less interesting upgrades because they have run out of ideas other than “put AI in it.” That has made the post-ChatGPT product cycle bland and boring, in a moment that could otherwise have been incredibly exciting. AI isn’t good enough, and it’s dragging everything else down with it.
Archive link: https://archive.ph/spnT6
the bar is so low that even a lean secure android OS without bloatware would be revolutionary.
I agree but I suspect that the problem is that people have different opinions on where the line is on that. Presumably somebody, somewhere actually plays that stupid candy crush thing on Windows for example. It’s probably a ‘valuable service’ for it to be pre installed for them.
I kinda hate them but they’re allowed to like it.
I could live with pre installed apps as long as they can be removed… i remember having useless apps like google music, youtube, weird browsers and other random apps that could not be removed, I could only uninstall the updates but the base version would remain… That stuff is predatory if i do not use them why should i be forced to have them on my phone.
Yup. I remember when the iPhone first appeared, my first one was the 3GS and they had so much pre-installed nonsense. It’s very frustrating.