It's glowtime: AI in spotlight as Apple launches GenAI-backed iPhone16

By Tripp Mickle

Shortly before Steve Jobs’s death in 2011, Apple filled a cramped auditorium in Cupertino, California, for the unveiling of its fifth iPhone.
 

The device’s biggest selling point was a new software feature called Siri, which helped cause a jump in iPhone sales. Apple is planning to run that play again.
 

For the first time in more than a decade, the tech giant is unveiling a suite of iPhones whose signature feature won’t be an improved camera or an updated design, but new software capabilities. The system, called Apple Intelligence, will sort messages, offer writing suggestions and create a more capable Siri powered by generative artificial intelligence (AI).
 

The new iPhones represent a big moment for generative AI, which can answer questions, create images and write software code. As a latecomer to the AI party, Apple is in a position to take the technology mainstream — or sow fresh doubt about its viability if it doesn’t live up to expectations.
 

Early enthusiasm for AI has been tempered by questions about its utility. This spring, Microsoft postponed features in an AI computer because of security vulnerabilities around the technology’s recording of every second of activity. Humane, a start-up that raised $240 million for a device called the Ai Pin, was panned by tech reviewers because its system was slow to fulfil requests and sometimes fielded them inaccurately. In the wake of those problems, Wall Street is looking to Apple for reassurance that customers want AI. The tech giant spent two years watching as Microsoft, Meta, Google and Samsung added AI to products.

Apple has shown over the years that it can enter a market late and redefine it, as it did with digital music players, smartphones and smartwatches.
 

Apple is hoping that AI can rejuvenate the iPhone. It considers the opportunity in AI so important that it canceled one of its big bets — a $10 billion project to develop a self-driving car — and reassigned hundreds of engineers to work on the technology.
 

People are holding on to their iPhones longer as compelling new features have dwindled. The time between replacing an iPhone has expanded to nearly five years, up from three years in 2018, according to TD Securities, an investment bank.

 

©2024 The New York Times News Service