Apple Has New iPhones. Should We Care?
The annual iPhone release event was once the height of the tech calendar. In the age of generative AI, that's no longer the case.
In my early days reporting from San Francisco in the mid-2010s, no event was bigger than Apple’s annual iPhone release. Readers clamored for specs. Reporters jostled for photos. Website traffic surged.
A decade later, Apple continues to churn out new models, but little else remains constant. Even as Apple introduced the brand-new iPhone Air this week, its event felt weirdly anticlimactic. The company’s new iPhone may be thinner and sleeker than ever, but it’s no major leap forward. “The emperor has no clothes,” tweeted ex-Reddit CEO Yishan Wong alongside an image showing little change between the iPhone Air and the iPhone 6.
Apple has more new models on the way — reportedly including a folding phone and a curved-glass edition — but today’s tech breakthroughs are happening within the screens themselves, not the hardware around them. Smartphones, it seems, have reached their ultimate form factor, while the way we interact with them may be just starting to emerge.
The rise of generative artificial intelligence has the potential to revamp the way we use our devices, and Apple is still searching for answers on that front. While tapping on screens isn’t going away anytime soon, tech companies are now spending billions of dollars building natural language interfaces for devices and developing AI that navigates them for us. Should these efforts make progress, the actual phone you use won’t be as consequential as it is today, especially now that most are starting to look and feel the same.
“User interfaces are largely going to go away,” Eric Schmidt, the ex-CEO of Google who acquired Android, said in a recent interview. “The agents speak English, typically, or other languages. You can talk to them, you can say what you want, the UI can be generated.”
The iPhone Air will likely juice Apple’s iPhone sales, a blessing for a recently stagnant category, but the revenue bump will be moot if the company’s Apple Intelligence failures go beyond a short term, embarrassing mishap. If integrating AI deeply into the phone’s user interface becomes a differentiator — allowing for context-aware push notifications or quick, efficient information retrieval — Apple’s ability (or inability) to serve that use case will be more important than its phones’ width.
Despite talking about making a big AI acquisition to catch up with the rest of the pack, Apple has stood pat so far. Perplexity, which has deepening relationship with Samsung, remains independent despite a solid case for an Apple tie up. Meanwhile, Apple’s AI talent continues to exit, much of it to Meta. And Meta, for its part, is churning out devices worth paying attention to. It’s expected to release new AI-forward smart glasses with a display at its Connect conference next week.
Apple has built an empire on the modern version of the phone, but tech empires can be fleeting. And as the form factor of the phone solidifies, giving every release the same feel, the move to the next format will matter more. None of this will happen overnight, of course. But after this week’s iPhone release event, it’s hard to shake the feeling that Apple will need to make big changes to keep its golden era rolling.
Cloudera’s EVOLVE25: Explore the Potential of Bringing AI to Your Data – Anywhere (sponsor)
The future runs on AI, and AI runs on data. To stay competitive, enterprises need secure access to all their data, wherever it resides: across public clouds, data centers, and the edge. That’s exactly what Cloudera delivers.
As the trusted data and AI platform for the world’s largest organizations, Cloudera enables businesses to bring AI to their data—safely, efficiently, and at scale. At EVOLVE25 in New York City, Cloudera will showcase how leading enterprises are unifying and managing data to drive intelligent transformation.
Hear directly from customers and experts on breaking down silos, running AI workloads securely across environments, and accelerating the shift from applications to intelligent agents. Discover how organizations are reducing risk, maximizing ROI, and building AI responsibly on Cloudera’s proven open-source foundation.
Join Cloudera in New York City on September 25 to shape the future of data and AI. Register here.
What Else I’m Reading, Etc.
Larry Ellison dethrones Elon Musk after Oracle pops 40% in one day [The Guardian]
Nepal’s Gen Z revolt played out on Discord [New York Times]
Software engineers are offering their services to clean-up ‘vibe-coded’ software [404 Media]
Weekend read: In 1996 Wired wrote about the world’s longest wire (at the time) [Wired]
Robinhood Social, that’s a thing that’s coming [WSJ]
OpenAI and Microsoft reach a ‘nonbinding memorandum of understanding’ [FT]
Albanian government appoints an AI-bot to tackle corruption [Reuters]
Identity belongs in strategy, not dev backlogs. Our CIAM Buyer’s Guide cuts vendor spin and filler—just the facts you need to choose the right platform for your org. Download now. (sponsor)
This Week On Big Technology Podcast: Booz Allen CTO: Can AI Fix The Government? — With Bill Vass
Bill Vass is the Chief Technology Officer of Booz Allen. Vass joins Big Technology Podcast to discuss how governments can harness AI to cut redundancy and deliver better citizen services. Tune in to hear his inside view on LLM deployments from the VA to the International Space Station and the difficulty of modernizing mass bureaucracies. We also cover autonomous driving, humanoid robots, and quantum computing’s first real use-cases. Hit play for fascinating look into public sector AI, along with deep perspective on technology’s state of the art.
You can listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your podcast app of choice
Join Our Private Discord Server
Big Technology paid subscribers get access to our running conversation on the news of the day, covering AI and beyond. You can join via the link below: