William Gallagher
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.
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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37 Comments
No thanks.
The iPhone is importantly different from the iPod in the sense that the iPhone is a multi-purpose platform for running software while the iPod was a single purpose device for playing music. In that sense, the iPhone is more similar to the Mac than it is to the iPod. Forty years after the introduction of the Mac, Apple still sells something that people call and recognize as a "Mac" (even though in many ways, especially under the hood, it's a very different product).
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?
What the author of this article seems to gloss over that the iPod was discontinued because the iPhone did everything and iPod does and more. When consumers figured that out they stopped buying iPods. There was no market for it anymore, so it was discontinued. But the iPod totally exists still today. It’s called an iPhone or an iPad. Maybe in the future a new device will have all the features of an iPhone and more and people will stop buying iPhones and start buying the next thing. Will it be AI powered? Most certainly. Will it be something you carry around? Probably. The important thing is that these are just devices. Unless we have Wi-Fi and cellular chips and software installed in our brains and we walked around ourselves as a device, we’re always going to need/want something personal that we carry around with us to log in and connect with other people. What that device is and what it’s called is irrelevant. Technology and innovation will drive new markets which is essentially with Eddie Que said. It has never been the other way around. But humans are physical creatures that like to have physical things. So I suspect there will always be some kind of a thing that we carry around with us. at least in my lifetime, that thing will be called an iPhone. My parents called there devices a telephone and a phonebook. Maybe in the future it’ll be called a neural hairnet and implant and we each have our own personal and virtual AI assistant that is on voice command. Boy I love to be alive for that. Darn.
Bring on the chip implants!
Would be much more comfortable with implanting an Apple Silicon chip vs. a Neuralink.