We’ve seen two approaches to AI in mobile tech this year: “AI That’s Not Your Phone” and “AI That Does Random Stuff on Your Phone.” The “Not Your Phone” group includes devices like the Rabbit R1 and the Humane AI Pin, two small gadgets that sought to make AI more useful by building it into a smaller, simpler gadget. It hasn’t gone very well. Both devices came with big promises to help us get things done without looking at our phone screens. Neither delivered. Now it’s time for Apple, like Google and Microsoft before it, to announce a whole bunch of AI features at its annual developer conference today. But the current state of AI on our phones is, well, unimpressive. “AI Doing Random Stuff on Your Phone” includes Google’s generative AI tools like Magic Editor, Samsung Galaxy AI, and that kind of thing. Right now, it’s a bunch of party tricks that vary in quality from “kinda helpful” to “doesn’t really work” to “oh, dear GOD, no.” It’s definitely not the bold new future of mobile computing we’ve been promised. The company that has come the closest to showing us an AI feature that might actually save us some time is Microsoft. At its developer conference last month, the company announced Recall for its new Copilot Plus PCs — a feature that takes screenshots every few seconds of whatever you’re doing on your computer so you can use AI to search for it later. I could use that, like, yesterday. But maybe it’s a good thing Recall isn’t more widely available yet; it sounds like there are some serious security concerns. During its keynote today, it’ll be Apple’s turn to make the case for AI as our daily assistant — and the signals so far are encouraging.
Full report : Apple’s AI opportunity is all about the big picture.
