Apple's Eddy Cue is guessing that the iPhone will eventually be replaced by AI
During court testimony over Apple's search deal with Google, Apple executive Eddy Cue threw in a curveball, basically saying we shouldn't assume there will be an iPhone 30 someday.
Apple SVP of Services Eddy Cue. Photo credit: Re/Code
One strongly possible outcome of the Department of Justice's antitrust case against Google is that it may be forced to stop paying Apple to be the default search engine on iOS. That would mean Apple losing out on around $20 billion a year, so naturally the firm's senior vice president of services, Eddy Cue, is keen to keep the deal.
But in testimony that intended to reveal Apple is anyway looking into offering search via AI services, Cue also gave Apple's first-ever mention of a day when iPhones could be no more.
"You may not need an iPhone 10 years from now as crazy as it sounds," Cue said, as first spotted by Bloomberg. "The only way you truly have true competition is when you have technology shifts."
"Technology shifts create these opportunities," he continued. "AI is a new technology shift, and it's creating new opportunities for new entrants."
That second part of the quote is normal stuff from a man who also says he doesn't see how regular search won't now be replaced by AI. But it's the first part that's a bit more unexpected.
There does have to be a limit, there does have to be an end. We're surely not going to ever be hearing rumors of the iPhone 118 in a century's time, but it's still unusual for Apple to say it.
It's not, though, unusual for Apple to do something about it. For instance, you might not be able to pin down the day that the iPod started and stopped being ubiquitous and global, but you know it happened.
You also know that this world-dominating music player was destroyed in a flash, not by a rival, but by its own creator. Apple made the iPod, and Apple took it away.
In its time, the iPod was as commonplace a sight as the iPhone is now. But today, it is totally absent from the world, minus some enthusiasts keeping it alive with flash memory and so forth.
The iPod is effectively gone, the iPhone will go the same route. It's just a question of time, but you'd have bet it would be longer than another decade.
Unless the whole of Apple is just waiting for Tim Cook to announce his retirement before they ditch the iPhone and replace it with an AI-powered Apple Car.
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Comments
Will there ever come a time when people no longer want a mobile general purpose computing device with a touchscreen? Maybe, but there would still need to be some kind of device to serve as the interface to AI. Maybe he's thinking the iPhone will be replaced by a combo of Apple Glasses and AI?
Would be much more comfortable with implanting an Apple Silicon chip vs. a Neuralink.
Did Eddie Cue miss his medications that day? The only way AI will replace phones, including iPhones, is if we all quit talking to one another and spend our time conversing with AI bots. I doubt that will happen, and I wonder about the sanity much less good sense of those who claim otherwise.
That's exactly my experience. I quit buying iPods when I realized that I could get a used iPhone that did everything an iPod did and more for less money.
He's not saying "AI will replace phones." He's saying that tech is changing fast, so who knows what we'll be using a decade from now. Generative AI is just an example of technology that seemingly came out of nowhere and is very disruptive.
Kids graduating high school now were born before the iPhone existed. Kids who graduated high school when the iPhone was first released were born at time when AOL for DOS was just coming out, and CDs were the existential threat to vinyl records. So many of these things last just long enough for people to convince themselves that they've always been here and always will be. Next thing you know, ubiquity becomes old hat, and your custom-built entertainment center is completely mismatched with the now-ubiquitous technology that's perched awkwardly on top of the prior tech that's old enough to be obsolete, but not yet old enough to ironic retro.
Yes.. Lack of imagination.
We think that nothing can replace iPhones. But but but....
Recently, Tim Cook has made poor choices and decisions like listening to Luca, timid spending for chips, lack of LLM studies, their incompetent Siri, AppStore policy etc.
I would not be surprised if Apple is facing a "Nokia moment" right now. Apple can still be a big player with war chest in the future, but it is up to Apple.
Apple can´t afford to protect their reputation by their legacy. Kodak went down, because Kodak was too proud of what Kodak achieved. They did not innovate and disrupt to protect their legacy.
This is the same case for Apple.
And Apple may not make a silly decision from now on in this survival game.
Tim Cook still has excellent experts. He just needs to listen to them. Without Phil Schiller and Eddie Cue, Apple would not be where Apple is today.
This is a clickbait, but Eddie Cue says that iPhone usage may not be as crazy as now. And AI makes people less dependent on phones and wearables.
Until there's a replacement for the screen, the iPhone will still be around.
And for those looking forward to implants, may I direct you to S07E01 of Black Mirror?
Also for the record, LLM artificial intelligence isn't what everyone's hyping it up to be. It's a probabilistic program that analyzes a data input query and uses a really large database of other data to predict the most likely string of characters to offer in response. It isn't thinking. It isn't conscious or near conscious. The thing it does better than humans is index an idetic memory of all data used to "train" it. No human can collect and accurately recall that volume of data. On the other hand, no functional AI can be trained on the comparatively small amount of data that any human of reasonable intelligence requires. LLM AI is just an elaborate mimic. It isn't capable of original thought or creativity. The huge database of other people's content can make its mimicry seem like original thought or creativity, but it produces neither. Additionally, as more AI is used to create content that's then published on the internet, it creates a feedback loop that makes future AI dumber or at best pushes it toward a faltering grade C average. As probabilistic output becomes training data input, the peak of the AI training data bell curve gets higher and higher. Moreover, as wrong answers and hallucinations are generated, regurgitated and dumped right back into the training data pool, it increases the probability that future AI will continue to generate even more wrong answers and hallucinations.
But Apple even fails to start this base line.
It does not have to be perfect. It does not have to be super inteliigent to create another world.
a lot of people could abandon their iPhones now and move functionality to others devices if they have in the kit. The handbrake on that seems to be that the watch to replace adhoc voice calls and ready notifications has to be linked to a phone that can at least support the current os to keep the watch current.