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.
This article is from Big Technology, a newsletter by Alex Kantrowitz.
