If the past few years have taught us anything, it’s that the world of technology is changing faster than many of us expected.
Think about all the changes we’ve seen in the past five years.
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Before the COVID-19 pandemic, it was uncommon to order almost everything online. In 2019, about 11% of retail sales in the United States came from online. But the pandemic has changed a lot. Now, many of us can buy everything from essentials (like groceries and paper products) to extraneous items (like holiday sweaters and Halloween costumes) online.
Forrester predicts that by 2028, 28% of U.S. retail sales will come online. That’s quite a jump.
But our progress is not only reflected online, at least in stores.
Consider some of the other recent changes that have occurred over the past five years. Artificial intelligence is now a household name, touted on many of our phones and favorite browsers. 5G is rolling out faster than ever. Self-driving and electric vehicles are no longer considered the stuff of the future – in fact, there’s a good chance your next pizza delivery will be one. Augmented reality is one of the most coveted and complex problems our largest social media companies are competing to solve.
Getty Images.
(Some users remain skeptical)
While companies are gaining greater market share in the race for artificial intelligence, others are falling behind or rapidly losing consumer confidence as they pour billions of dollars into new ventures.
Take Meta FB as an example. While the company’s overall performance has been good, CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg’s continued enthusiasm for Meta Quest in recent quarters has worried investors. Its interactive virtual world. Reality Labs, Meta’s VR segment, reported a loss of $3.7 billion in the third quarter of 2023, a 33% increase from the previous year.
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But Meta insists that artificial intelligence is the future of its business, a position that is not unusual among Silicon Valley’s established companies.
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Another company entrenched in the AI race is Apple (AAPL) About $20 billion has been invested in artificial intelligence over the past five years.
The iPhone maker has made no secret of its ambition to become a leader in the field, saying it will spend more than $5 billion in 2025 to further integrate new technologies into some of its most popular ecosystems, such as iOS.
But not everyone agrees, at least not yet.
Apple’s artificial intelligence product, Apple Intelligence, has not yet been popular with many iPhone users. Currently, the product is mainly used to summarize text and other messages, or to help people navigate through countless notifications.
But Apple Intelligence is a resource-intensive product. As its functionality increases, it takes up more storage space. In September 2024, Apple Intelligence will require only 4 GB of storage space. Now, just four months later, that number has almost doubled to around 7GB of storage. iPhone users are not happy.
“Does anyone else think Apple smartphones are worthless?” one user asked on the iPhone subreddit. “The only real difference I see is how the graphics change when you talk to Siri. Apple’s voice commands already lag behind products from other big companies, and that doesn’t seem to be improving.”
Another commenter wrote: “I don’t have high expectations for Siri yet. It’s new and rough, but I have hope. She will sometimes respond instead of just searching the internet.”
Another wrote: “I find the notification summary useful for quickly browsing notifications for a group chat or multiple emails.”
“I find them very wrong,” one user responded.
A recent survey found that 73% of iPhone users believe Apple Intelligence has “little value.”
So while some customers find Apple Intelligence’s features convenient, nagging issues like storage issues and battery drain may outweigh the convenience, at least for now.
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