The onrushing AI era was supposed to create boom times for great gadgets. Not long ago, analysts were predicting that Apple Intelligence would start a “supercycle” of smartphone upgrades, with tons of new AI features compelling people to buy them. Amazon and Google and others were explaining how their ecosystems of devices would make computing seamless, natural, and personal. Startups were flooding the market with ChatGPT-powered gadgets, so you’d never be out of touch. AI was going to make every gadget great, and every gadget was going to change to embrace the AI world.
This whole promise hinged on the idea that Siri, Alexa, Gemini, ChatGPT, and other chatbots had gotten so good, they’d change how we do everything. Typing and tapping would soon be passé, all replaced by multimodal, omnipresent AI helpers. You wouldn’t need to do things yourself; you’d just tell your assistant what you need, and it would tap into the whole world of apps and information to do it for you. Tech companies large and small have been betting on virtual assistants for more than a decade, to little avail. But this new generation of AI was going to change things.
There was just one problem with the whole theory: the tech still doesn’t work. Chatbots may be fun to talk to and an occasionally useful replacement for Google, but truly game-changing virtual assistants are nowhere close to ready. And without them, the gadget revolution we were promised has utterly failed to materialize.
In the meantime, the tech industry allowed itself to be so distracted by these shiny language models that it basically stopped trying to make otherwise good gadgets. Some companies have more or less stopped making new things altogether, waiting for AI to be good enough before it ships. Others have resorted to shipping more iterative, less interesting upgrades because they have run out of ideas other than “put AI in it.” That has made the post-ChatGPT product cycle bland and boring, in a moment that could otherwise have been incredibly exciting. AI isn’t good enough, and it’s dragging everything else down with it.
Apple is probably the worst and most obvious offender here. For nearly a year, ever since the company debuted Apple Intelligence at WWDC last June, it has pitched just about every one of its new products the same way: “it runs Apple Intelligence!” The iPhone 16 ads were less about the iPhone 16 and more about showing off what Apple Intelligence could do — never mind that Apple Intelligence didn’t even ship until months after the iPhone 16. When Apple upgraded the iPad Mini, then the iPad Air, it promoted Apple Intelligence as the reason for both. (The also-new base iPad doesn’t support Apple Intelligence, and so Apple has effectively tried to bury its existence.) The website for the new MacBook Air promotes three things about the bestselling laptop on earth: its battery life, its chip, and Apple Intelligence.
Meanwhile, Apple Intelligence is currently just a couple of writing tools and a way to poorly summarize your text messages. (And, sure, Genmoji.) The feature people actually want, the one Apple has been relentlessly promoting, is a vastly improved Siri that can better understand and execute your requests, even using your apps on your behalf. That feature is nowhere to be found and “is going to take us longer than we thought,” Apple spokesperson Jacqueline Roy recently told John Gruber at Daring Fireball. The company pulled a commercial with Bella Ramsey in it that advertised the iPhone 16 Pro using this now-even-further-delayed feature.
It’s hard not to feel bait and switched by the whole thing. For months, people have seen advertisements for features that don’t exist, bought gadgets that don’t work the way they’re supposed to, and been generally duped into thinking a tiny spec bump was a game-changing upgrade. At this point, of course, Apple is too committed to Apple Intelligence to walk it back, and investors would crush the company if it did.
Siri’s ongoing crappiness appears to also be the reason behind the delay of Apple’s next big product launch. We’ve been hearing for months about a smart home hub that would leverage Apple Intelligence — and, in particular, that better, more aware Siri — to control your house and accomplish tasks on your behalf. (Imagine Alexa, but Siri, and you basically have it.) Bloomberg reported that the device was supposed to launch as soon as this month but is being pushed back in part because the underlying tech just doesn’t work.
These kinds of context-aware, voice-enabled ambient computing devices were supposed to be what AI made possible. That’s why Amazon, too, allowed itself to be totally captured by AI long before AI was ready to be a useful consumer product. Amazon was once among the most interesting, experimental hardware makers on the market — remember that one year it launched like 6,000 Alexa devices in one day, including a microwave and a wall clock? Amazon wasn’t always right, but it was never dull. Amazon hasn’t released a meaningfully new Echo device since September 2023, the day the company also announced a new version of Alexa that then-hardware chief Dave Limp called “a superhuman assistant.” Since then, we’ve gotten old ideas on slightly larger screens, with the same problems Amazon has had for years.
Amazon was all in on this new Alexa, betting that it could turn its smart speakers from a music and timers machine into something vastly more useful. You wouldn’t even necessarily need new hardware for it; your gadgets would just keep getting better. But then, of course, Amazon confronted the reality of the AI situation. It took nearly 18 months of work, and a lot of rumors and reports that suggested AI Alexa was actually pretty terrible, before the company launched pretty much the same thing all over again. Only this time, with new hardware chief Panos Panay doing the talking. And no devices to show. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy promised “beautiful” new hardware this fall but revealed no other details.
It’s not just big companies, either. For the last year or so, the hottest thing in startups has been “put a microphone on a lanyard, record your whole life, and use AI to do… something with it!” That’s the pitch for Friend, and Omi, and Limitless, and Plaud, and Bee, and so many others. Jony Ive and OpenAI are working on some kind of AI hardware together. Investors poured huge money into Humane, only to see that collapse less than a year after its first launch. Rabbit’s R1 was a flop. None of these devices have so far been compelling, and some of them just plain don’t work.
To be fair, product makers are in a tough spot right now. If you believe AI is a paradigm shift, that it will change the world the way smartphones or the internet did, you’d be foolish to wait around for the tech to be perfect. By then, it’ll be too late, and you’ll have lost the race.
Too many companies have made all their plans based on some theoretical and perfected end state of AI
The problem is that too many companies have made all their plans based on some theoretical and perfected end state of AI, rather than looking for ways to make it useful right now. There are already lots of ways AI can make products more useful and interesting: cutting-edge models can make your robot vacuum more efficient or help your video doorbell better distinguish between people and tree branches. AI can make your smart lights a lot smarter or figure out what you’re cooking and get the sear just right. In all these cases, though, AI is an enabling technology for some other feature — not the feature itself. Nobody’s buying a smart grill for the AI; they’re buying it for the steaks.
Maybe someday, “you can do AI with it” will be a selling point for gadgets. In the interim phase, it feels like we’re wasting an entire generation of hardware while we wait for the software to catch up. And there are so many other interesting problems to solve! What if, instead of hand-wavey promises about AI, we got smartphones that lasted twice as long or didn’t break so easily? What if startups focused less on AI and more on the millions of people looking for devices that are less addictive and more attuned to a specific purpose? What if Amazon and Apple stopped waiting for some magical technological overhaul and spent time making their existing devices easier to use?
There’s still so much room for innovation and improvement in the hardware we use every day, and yet nobody wants to try that stuff. They’d rather sit around and wait for AI to solve all our problems. No matter how long it takes.
