The term now seems almost quaint, the “iPhone killer”.
For almost two decades, technology companies have tried to dethrone the king of gadgets, without success. The phone market has since matured, and consumers have such a “good enough” choice that Apple (AAPL) is having trouble convincing people to upgrade.
What’s urgently motivating the tech world today is not an effort to directly overthrow the smartphone, but to find new ways to integrate AI into hardware old and new.
And the arguments in favor of this measure are becoming more and more convincing.
Apple itself is getting in on the action. Much like its lock-in on apps and services, Cupertino acts as an innovative landlord, extracting rents. And, as Yorkville Ives’ Dan Ives said, the company is looking to expand that strategy as a “toll collector on the consumer AI highway.”
“Much of the debate has centered on whether Apple arrived at generative AI sooner or later,” he wrote in a note earlier this week. “We think the most important question is how well the company can put useful AI in front of an installed base of more than 2.5 billion active devices and 1.5 billion iPhones.”
For any AI-enabled device, trust will be key. And that’s where Apple shines. While the new generation of AI labs grapple with muddy debates about security, mass unemployment, security vulnerabilities and abuse, Apple quietly goes about its business, restoring its reputation.
No malicious AI agents or apocalyptic AI takeovers here. Just an upgraded Siri that everyone’s been waiting for, and more ways to use the apps you already rely on to get things done.
In a roundabout way, new AI-powered hardware could be the catalyst for a weakening of the smartphone’s dominance as the ultimate consumer form factor.
Microsoft this week unveiled its Nvidia-powered Surface Laptop Ultra, designed to let users run AI models at home without relying on the cloud. This is another path to AI hardware success. The idea of running your own micro-data center at home may not be for everyone, but it has some appeal when you consider how much AI can cost on the cloud.
Rather than using an online AI service, you can load an app onto your computer, download the model you want, and get busy, essentially for the cost of your computer and your electricity bill. For consumers and professionals whose primary concern is maintaining privacy in the AI era, using your own high-performance machine has particular appeal.
But maybe Apple will join Microsoft in doing this, and maybe the iPhone will still be the frontrunner for a person’s DIY AI model at home.
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