The numbers are out. Research from CIRP reported that iPhone loyalty in the U.S. climbed last year, to 87%, in line with ongoing annual trends. iPhone users just aren’t switching to Android, but Android users keep making the move to iOS. In fact, Apple’s loyalty rate climbed by three percentage points last year alone.
How could this happen? Apple promised AI for Siri years ago but didn’t deliver. There was even a lawsuit in place over it! Even back then, Apple was late to the AI game, falling behind even more each year.
Despite that, users not only stuck with Apple, they left Google. I’ve heard frustration from other Android users over all the AI Google is shoving in their faces, getting in the way of what they actually want to do. It adds so much unnecessary friction that users are becoming annoyed. At least one person I talked to specifically listed Google’s obtrusive AI as a reason they’re thinking of switching to an iPhone for their next phone. The other major reason is, of course, iMessage.
This polling doesn’t necessarily prove that AI doesn’t sell, but it does suggest that AI isn’t enough for consumers to change their platform. It’s not a driver of sales. While features like camera quality, video, and iMessage still drive loyalty and switchers, AI can’t change user’s minds. Polling suggests that AI may hurt tech companies more than it helps them.
Users either hate AI or don’t care for it enough to actually change their usage habits for it. Many aren’t finding it useful, just annoying. Despite this, having run out of ideas, companies will continue to jam it down our throats, even as we keep spitting it back out. How many lost sales do they need before they figure it out?
In This Article:
AI Isn’t a Selling Point
Normal people don’t obsess over AI. Some people may use it for a few annoying or repetitive tasks, but the vast majority of people are wary about AI. Between data centers, brain drain, high costs of subscriptions for heavy use, AI psychosis, and people being forced to use it at work, damaging their efficiency, people are getting tired of AI.
Google introduced plenty of AI features well before Apple. But unlike a new iPhone, people weren’t talking about it. Oh, the tool could write an email for you? Answer calls for you? Generate images of emoji for you? No one cares. I didn’t receive a single one of those genAI images, not even in any of my group chats. People just don’t want this.
Apple introduces an orange iPhone and people excitedly upgraded to it. Google introduces AI, blowing Apple out of the water on the AI front, and no one switched. Instead, they went to Apple in greater droves. AI doesn’t sell. Companies are pouring billions into it and you know what the tech world is raving about right now? The new passport-style Samsung Galaxy Z 8 Fold. We want new, and AI isn’t new. Nothing AI makes is new. It’s just slop. Slop we’ve seen before in far better forms from actual creators. No one’s buying slop, no matter how much it’s forced upon us.
Polling Backs up Consumer Malaise
If you’re thinking that it seems like everyone around you hates AI, you’re not imagining it. A CNET poll showed that 73% of iPhone users, who haven’t even had much access to new AI features, say AI adds “little to no value” to their phone. That’s a vast majority of people who don’t even have access to as much AI features as Android users do. However, a whopping 87% of Samsung device users say the same, that AI adds “little to no value” to their phone.
While folding phones have not gained popularity yet due to their expense and concerns around longevity, they still feature a higher interest rate than anything with AI. Only 12% of iPhone users say they would consider AI a reason to upgrade to a new device, if their current phone didn’t support the feature. We haven’t even seen the designs, features, battery life, cameras, screens, nothing of Apple’s upcoming foldable, yet it has a preliminary interest among current iPhone users one percentage point greater than the AI features Apple’s been spending over half their presentations bragging about for the past two years.
They just can’t sell AI. Apple, the marketing geniuses that they are, cannot get people interested in their AI features. But a phone they haven’t even revealed yet, haven’t marketed yet, and exists only in rumors among the tech-obsessed, has a higher interest rate than something Apple has been shilling for years. The moment Apple reveals a folding iPhone, it’ll be the most desirable thing in tech. Apple can market it. They can’t market AI.
Phones Need to Focus on What’s Next; it’s Not AI
You might think the future of smartphones are in foldable devices. Either those that go from a small square-shaped outer display into a standard long smartphone shape, or those that go from either a standard smartphone shape or squat shape into more of a tablet shape. I have my own preferences, but at its core, all I really want is a smaller phone. Smaller than even my iPhone 13 mini. Something that can really become a smaller part of my life. A device less for scrolling endlessly and more for communicating and quick tasks. My interest in foldables comes in the form of my interest to de-centralize my smartphone in my life and my algorithmic dopamine addiction.
The market tends to follow what Apple does, as do consumer interests. That’s why it’s interesting to see Apple embracing AI and the market disagreeing with them. If Apple can’t sell consumers on AI, who can?
The Smart Get Dumb
A growing sentiment is escaping the ordinary. Escaping Apple’s walled garden, Google’s spyware, and algorithmic feeds that capture our attention and influence our politics. People increasingly want something that allows them to focus on their friends, their work, their life, and get away from doomscrolling and spyware.
What does de-centering the smartphone look for our lives, and why does it seem so attractive to so many smartphone users today?
This may be best reflected in renewed interest for non-Google smartphone operating systems, like those built atop the Android Open Source Project (AOSP), Jolla’s SailfishOS, which powers their Jolla 2 smartphone and the upcoming Commodore Callback, and even custom-made dumbphone operating systems, made to give users the features they need from a smartphone, without anything else. This includes phones made by Light and others, for example. You can even find the right “dumbphone” for you on websites like Dumbphones.org and in Reddit communities. For me, the best option now was a Sidephone, and I’m testing one out as I wrote this piece. The most exciting phones today are those that reduce the addictive experience of smartphones and protect privacy.
Give Up the Bloated Tech
People are walking around more frequently with notebooks, digital cameras, iPods and other music players (get a cassette player!). They’re de-centering the smartphone in their life and finding clarity, creativity, better mood, better sleep, and retaining real connections with friends, especially without the use of a screen. Switching to a phone that can help you be connected to the world and people around you may be one of the best things you can do for your mental health, and you can find numerous reports of people stating it improved their mental state or helped them feel better about their phone use. Perhaps that’s why so many people are gravitating towards dumbphones and away from these slabs of glass made to keep us addicted to scrolling and track our every action, location, and desire.
What could the future of the smartphone look like? It will be a device that doesn’t insist on its use. A device that becomes part of your life without taking over your life. It could be a smaller screen, physical keyboard, a phone without social media, a phone that’s focused entirely on the camera experience. Basically? Phones might finally become interesting again, like they were before the iPhone was introduced and smartphones became all the same copy of Apple’s design. We might finally find devices that are uniquely made to suit our needs as individuals again.
Anything’s better than scrolling through Reels for 3 hours a day, right?
One thing’s certain, the future of smartphones won’t include annoying, obtrusive, wasteful, harmful AI. We don’t want it, and if cellphone manufacturers want us to buy new devices, they’re going to have to ditch the slop and try being creative.
That is, if they can put down their phones long enough to do it.