- Apple, Samsung, and Google are all using AI to breathe new life into their devices.
- They will use it to sell mobile phones to consumers who are becoming less enthusiastic about them.
- This signals a new era in the once fierce battle between smartphone makers.
You almost certainly own a smartphone, and it probably feels like you've had the same one for years.
While smartphone giants like Apple and Samsung once fought a fierce smartphone war to get more tech into consumers' pockets, these devices have become ubiquitous in recent years and their capabilities seem to have plateaued.
With billions of people owning smartphones, companies that sell them no longer have to try as hard to convince people to buy one.
The competition may have calmed down since then, but the original smartphone wars were so fierce that Steve Jobs once threatened to start a “thermonuclear war.”
The late Apple founder was infuriated when Google released its smartphone operating system, Android, just 11 months after the original iPhone was released in January 2007. He felt that Apple's hard work had been stolen.
“If necessary, with my last breath, I will spend every penny of the $40 billion in Apple's bank to right this wrong,” Jobs said, according to his authorized biography by Walter Isaacson.
The hostility wasn't limited to Google: Apple executives were infuriated in 2010 when they saw the Samsung Galaxy S as an iPhone copycat, and further resentment arose when Samsung, long a major Apple supplier, decided to partner with Google to embed Android in its devices.
What followed were years of bitter litigation over alleged patent infringement and a fierce battle between smartphone makers competing to sell their vision of pocket-sized hardware to consumers.
It's been several years since those bitter battles began, but a 2018 court settlement over a patent dispute may have helped put an end to the dispute. — There are signs that a new era in the smartphone wars is on the way, this time fuelled by AI.
The smartphone wars in the age of AI
The smartphone market is in a slump. According to statistics from data firm Canalys, smartphone shipments in 2023 will be 1.14 billion units, down 4% from 2022.
People appear to be hanging on to their existing phones for longer. According to data released in November by business services company Assurant, the average age of a phone user is The time since I traded it in or upgraded was just over three and a half years. The industry has come to expect consumers to upgrade every one to two years, and it's hard to blame them for this change.
Apple has often released new iPhone models that are almost the same as previous models. New features are sometimes small or seem pointless. The iPhone 15 Pro has the same 6.1-inch “Super Retina XDR display” as the iPhone 14 Pro, but the ring/silent switch has been replaced with an “action button.” The GPU has changed from 5 cores to 6 cores. The same situation exists with Samsung's Galaxy series and Google's Pixel smartphones.
But generative AI is likely to bring an end to the era of small changes.
Apple, Samsung and Google have all been vocal about how they are using the technology to breathe new life into their devices.
Earlier this month, Apple CEO Tim Cook used the first day of the company's Worldwide Developers Conference to unveil Apple Intelligence, a suite of new AI features aimed at overhauling the company's entire hardware line, set to be released later this year.
On iPhone, the company says, Apple Intelligence will help “improve writing quality” for everything from emails, messages, and documents to voice summarization and powering the Siri virtual assistant. Apple also struck a deal with ChatGPT creator OpenAI to more deeply integrate the popular chatbot into its OS.
The iPhone accounted for more than half of the company's revenue, or $200.6 billion of the company's net sales of $383.3 billion last fiscal year.
The company hopes Apple Intelligence will be a hit with consumers and could revitalize sales in markets such as China, where new products from domestic rivals such as Huawei's Mate 60 Pro have proven popular. iPhone sales in China fell 19% year-on-year in the first quarter of 2024, according to figures from Counterpoint.
Google and Samsung have been busy as well.
Last month, Google demoed its AI assistant, Project Astra, at its I/O conference, designed to support the multimodal Gemini model and provide real-time conversation and support on its Pixel smartphones, which are usually announced in the fall and will be launched on August 13.
The company also announced other AI features, including spam call detection, creating AI-generated images and displaying them in apps like Gmail, and letting users quickly retrieve information from large PDFs by asking simple questions.
Samsung is set to unveil an update to its Galaxy S24 smartphone series, called Galaxy AI, at an event in Paris next month, an attempt to bring “meaningful intelligence” to communications.
The South Korean tech giant will no doubt be eager to reclaim its crown as the smartphone champion, a title it lost last year when Apple grabbed the lion's share, according to data from market research firm IDC.
The market may be starting to stagnate after years of lackluster updates to products you already own, but smartphone makers are capitalizing on AI to fuel the hype around it, and we think 2024 will be a competitive year.
