Smartphone buyers meh on AI, care more about battery life

iphone minis weren't particularly borked, and they didn't sell well enough, people apparently preferred the larger iphones (to my own dismay)

Maybe the fixed costs of a shoe factory production line, in 2024, with centuries of production experience, are lower than those of a top of the line smartphone.

That’s one of the big problems with these dominant trillion dollar corporations. For them it’s not worth to pursue something as small as a billion dollar market but they still have enough market power to suppress any competitor who wants to deliver such a product. That’s why we are seeing less and less innovation and diversity compared to the 1980s to around 2000

How can you be confident in this when you don't even see their sales data?

Still, I would like to see a smaller regularly updated phone. Bonus points if there is a high-end version, because small shouldn't mean budget (like with iPhone SE).

They have repeatedly attempted to sell small phones. They don't sell in significant numbers, unfortunately.

I'm sorry to say this, but again just face the reality of the fact that not enough people truly want this size of phone.

There's a congregation of people on HN who do, I suspect they're also the type of people who'll run their phones for 5+ years where their bigger phone buying brethren are replacing every year or two at most.

The market for the "small" smartphone just isn't profitable enough to bother with for most manufacturers.

To each their own, except apple's not making new mini form-factor iphones anymore so us mini preferrers will at some point not have our own.

I’ll upgrade the second a new mini comes out…but I’m keeping it for now.

So do the swap yourself.

Part and kit: https://www.ifixit.com/products/iphone-12-mini-replacement-b...

Steps: https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/iPhone+12+mini+Battery+Replacem...

Oh boy I hope that doesn’t happen to me. It took them a week to get iPhone 13 mini battery in.

Isn't that obvious? They tried to switch back to Google Assistant, but each time they asked Gemini, it said it can't do that yet!

> Then why are you using it?

I'm not, I pretty much just accepted that Google doesn't care about usability whatsoever and haven't prompted it in a very long time.

To be clear, the only time I've ever used it was via "ok Google" in contexts in which I'm unable to interface with the phone directly, i.e while driving. If it doesn't work you'll learn that you can't start driving before queueing the navigation anymore. The voice assistant was a nice feature, but not important enough to waste my time trying to figure out which feature they opted me into and how to get back out of it.

In my case it just kinda.. switched over at some point, and frankly I didn't care enough to figure out how I might switch it back (if I even could). I had a similar frustration to GP that it stopped working for 100% of the queries I used to use it for.

That said, at some point it started working better, but there was a good 6-12 months where it was a tire fire.

For a bit, and to a degree, yes. Last-decade image recognition and tagging teased what might be possible and is genuinely useful.

The new LLM-ish tools promise that users can be more vague and casual in what language they use and more elaborate in how specific they mean to be; and that the queries (and operations) can span more diverse data sources.

iOS has been doing this for a bit too. I don't use it enough to really know how good it is but I can definitely look for cats or people I know. Haven't used Apple Intelligence yet so maybe that's better as well?

>But that whole find me something on my mutliple gigabytes of storage on my device account definitely seems like the mass appeal

This is such a mundane use of AI, but unsurprising Apple would sell it as revolutionary.

I'm not sure that a hallucinated image of something is better than the original image when you're doing spywork.

The difference between whether someone has 4 or 5 fingers, whether they're holding a gun versus a random object, or whether they're mixed-race or caucasian, all seem like they would be pretty important things. Likewise, car number plates, signage in the photo that help identify where it is, metadata of the image itself (often more useful than the image), are all incredibly important. All of those are things that AI is absolutely terrible at lmao.

Why would you trust AI, something that regularly makes stuff up, to be able to accurately determine that?

That’d be useful but I’m pretty sure they’d get a massive backlash on Fox News and lawsuits filed alleging “being cancelled” within minutes of that shipping. It’s something we need but our current disinformation problem isn’t an accident but the result of decades of investment.

The less fraught one is warning users that they’re being scammed: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/05/google-wants-ai-to-l...

I can't imagine that working, even if that AI were more reliable than currently possible. Someone who already disbelieves credible reporting and objective sources is not going to be swayed by an AI telling them to disregard their fantastical conspiracy theories. Especially not in a near-future world where everyone is inundated with AI fakery.

That's even without considering the efforts that would be made to undermine any system that showed any effectiveness. A lot of misinformation, probably most of the stuff that gets traction, isn't random, it's serving a purpose and being pushed for that reason.

And who's going to teach the AI what's a conspiracy and what's not? Battles have been fought over what narrative certain Wikipedia pages should push; it's pretty hard to find information that can be objectively considered the truth.

> Im not sure people really know how to use an AI chat bot or understand its a more powerful, quicker and personally more fun way of getting information then just a Google search

I can't speak to your personal entertainment experience, but AI chatbots are generally a slower, less accurate way of getting information than a google search. (Though Google polluting search results with a big, often inaccurate, AI result at the top narrows this a bit.)

All of that sounds like the boring low-hanging life fruit that gets trotted out in videos by companies like Apple and Google as being "revolutionary." It's boring. It's staged. It's the easy stuff. It's well-off 20-somethings solving non-problems for other well-off 20-somethings.

Wake me up when I can say things like…

Hey, Google, are my custom license plates ready for pick up at the tax office?

Hey, Siri, ask my doctor to refill this medicine.

Hey, Alexa, how many charging stations are broken at the gas station on 16th street?

Hey, Google, why is this plant dying?

Hey, Siri, why are there so many people in my neighborhood today?

Hey, Alexa, did anything ever get done about that story in the newspaper from a couple of years ago about the Chinese slave labor being used to grow pot on illegal farms on the Navajo reservation?

"AI" just doesn't have access to the information required to do anything interesting or useful. And because so much of its information comes from the web, which is already so polluted on certain subject (gardening, travel) as to be useless, the AI becomes useless.

Yeah, I would like Siri to actually play the album I asked for and not something completely different phonetically from what I asked. Or even when I set an alarm and not be told "I can't connect to the internet right now" while I'm using my laptop connected to the internet. Or if my internet is down to actually use the speakers that I bought as speakers.

The hardware is really well done but the software is either over or under-engineered to a stupid degree.

I have it set up with ollama. It’s… interesting. HA commands are provided to the model as tools so it works as well as the model is able to determine when and how to use tools. From experimenting with that and my own tool use code I’ve found that models vary greatly in their ability to wield tools and none that I’ve tried are exceptional.

It’s neat that you can intermix general chatting with HA commands but you’re probably going to find that the old assist is more reliable for commands. What I do like is that you can use a template as your system prompt so you can provide the state of a number of entities and then ask for them with natural language. That works well.

I have an Alexa/Echo voice announcement system set up and have recently tied that into assist so I can do automations like if the garage opens I prompt for “what is the state of the garage?” and announce the result. Makes it feel more humane than the same plain announcements all the time.

Do try it. I've been running it ever since it got integrated into the core, mostly to control A/C units around our flat, and it's the best voice assistant experience I had to date.

I mean honestly, how is it possible Amazon, Apple, Google and Microsoft[0] all keep screwing this up for over a decade now? I literally spent 15 minutes hooking up GPT-4 to the Home Assistant integration, and I was able to semi-reliably[1] control actual devices[2] like air conditioners and smart lights, in a completely natural and ad-hoc way, by talking to my smartwatch on the go, or to a phone, whatever was more convenient at the moment.

It's a really magical experience, a step closer to Star Trek reality. And what makes it possible is not just LLMs being able to deal with natural language, but more importantly, "bring your own API key" model allowing to cut away all the bullshit that FAANG assistants are stuck in.

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[0] - Ever since they dropped MS Speech API in Windows, and did the Cortana thing. Some 15 years passed, at this point, and I'd still prefer to work with the Speech API than to touch any of the FAANGs' voice assistant - it worked, and worked off-line!

[1] - Works ~90% of the time; some 5% of the time the voice model (from Home Assistant Cloud) misunderstands me, and 5% of the time the LLM gets confused. It's still worth it, because I can actually talk to it like to a person, without thinking of style or grammar or magic keywords.

[2] - Which, given the level of integration of Home Assistant companion app with the phone, can be easily turned into an equivalent of on-phone voice assistant that can do more than the one I got from Google. Critically, there are ways to couple Home Assistant app and Tasker, so it's not hard to make it do arbitrary things on your phone. And, if you don't like low-ish code Tasker experience, you can trivially shell out from Tasker to Termux, at which point sky is the limit. Point being, an enthusiastic non-developer with minimal tech aptitude can beat Google and Apple at the voice assistant game today.

That’s the line of thinking behind Halide’s recent “process zero” feature on iOS

https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/14/24220178/halide-camera-ap...

Here you go: https://www.theverge.com/c/24208960/digicam-digital-camera-c...

> I'm having a horrifying realization that all of my pictures are "fake" in the sense that they don't match what I saw/experienced.

I'd caution that judicious/proper post-processing is actually needed if you want that result, because of the differences between the sensors.

Your human experience comes from many small pictures taken by a set of lenses panning across multiple points in a scene with constantly adjusting exposure times and focal lengths, all biologically composited into what feels like a single moment.

Trying to fully replicate that with a single artificial picture is going to be deficient in certain ways.

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Separately, a pet peeve of mine: Too many people have been subtly brainwashed into conflating the "like I was really there" with " like a Hollywood film camera was really there." Then the next thing you know your medieval fantasy game has lens flares in it for no good reason.

I recently bought a real camera partially for this reason. I don't even mind how inconvenient it can be at times because honestly taking photos with a full camera rather than your phone is fun. While on the phone it has become quite dull in my opinion.

But knowing that the phone does a lot of software tweaking to get a picture to look similar to how good a full camera is made me want to switch. I think this was around the time that article about Samsung basically replacing a photo of the moon.

What does this mean? Sure, if generative AI is filling in features that weren't present, anyone would call that doctored or fake. But computational photography is mostly about recognizing patterns and filling in assumed detail... which is also how your visual cortex works.

Get raw, and marvel at its imperfection and ugliness in many aspects. If given phone ain't giving up raw data, take any decent camera, raw sensor data has been part of it since its beginning.

But those pics will be probably further from perceived reality than those enhanced by software (lets not get retarded here and don't brand every data processing as 'AI'). Distortions not only of barrel type, waning brightness towards edges, moire, heavy vignetting, tons of noise, over/underexposition, maybe some dead pixels... thats not how I see my days go by.

What makes a Polaroid any more "real" than an iPhone picture to you? Can any photo truly be real? (Deleuze has some interesting thoughts on the matter)

... then one day the tentacles come out ... https://i.redd.it/j1cr7pr6m7j71.jpg

That's what AI is. The weights are the clever part. Cameras have done this since the Nikon FA in 1983.

what about the infamous recognizing the moon in the background that is just an over exposed white fuzzy circle and replacing with a stock image with full surface details? clearly there's some sort of ML/recognition of content within the image

Had I not been flustered and in insane traffic I probably would have been able to figure this out on the spot quickly enough. I did eventually try this after a few minutes and it still wasn’t working. Alternatively, the product could just work how it’s advertised.

I'm unsure of your point. Are you arguing that issuing a verbal command to my voice assistant is not paying attention to the road? No more than talking to a passenger, really.

When something is called CarPlay and actively marketed as a way to use your phone services whilst driving, you would expect it to have a good enough UX that doesnt detract from safe driving to use it.

I mean, sure. Or this could just work how it's marketed to work. Thanks for the helpful reminder!

OpenAI whisper runs on iOS native on device, can't be just costs. https://github.com/openai/whisper/discussions/407

Lazy? Is it a moral failing not to be interested in playing the guitar? I have no interest in guitar music, so why should I "try hard"?

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Yeah, it's bad. Excluding the people who checked neither is probably better, but it's still not perfect because it leaves out the people who read both options and would have said "undecided" if it were a choice.

It's just a bad poll.

Me too! If anything, iPhone photos became more over-processed over the last decade.

Google photos search doesn't work well at all for me.

Even things like "[my dog name] beach" isn't reliable.

Or things like I use photos as notes. It doesn't reliably recall things like cheese when I take pictures of cheese in various stores to remember what is sold where. Not even the name of the cheese; just cheese. Ditto spices.