If the past few years have taught us anything, it’s that the tech world is changing even faster than many of us anticipated.
Consider everything we’ve seen change over the past five years.
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Before COVID-19, ordering nearly everything online wasn’t a regular occurrence. In 2019, around 11% of U.S. retail sales were made online. But the pandemic changed a lot of that. Now, many of us get everything from the essentials (like groceries and paper products) to the superfluous (like holiday sweaters and Halloween costumes) online.
By 2028, Forrester predicts that 28% of all retail sales made in the U.S. will be made online. That’s a pretty big jump.
But our advancements haven’t just been made online, at least at the storefront.
Consider some of the other recent changes in the past five years. Artificial intelligence is now a household name that many of our phones and favorite browsers tout. 5G is being rolled out at a faster clip than ever. Autonomous and electric vehicles are no longer considered the stuff of the future — in fact, there’s a good chance your next pizza delivery might roll up in one. And augmented reality is one of the most coveted— and complicated — puzzles our largest social media companies are racing to solve.
Tim Cook poses with an Apple iPhone 16.
Getty images.
(Some users remain skeptical)
While companies are making strides to capture more market share in the race for artificial intelligence, others have been falling behind or rapidly losing consumer confidence as they dump billions of dollars into new ventures.
Take Meta FB, for example. While the company’s overall performance has been positive, CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg has concerned investors in recent quarters over his perpetual enthusiasm for the Meta Quest, his company’s virtual reality headset which allows users access to its interactive metaverse. Reality Labs, Meta’s VR subdivision, reported a loss of $3.7 billion in Q3 2023. That’s up 33% from the year prior.
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But Meta maintains that artificial intelligence is the future of its business, and that position is hardly the exception among Silicon Valley incumbents.
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Another company firmly entrenched in the artificial intelligence race is Apple (AAPL) , which has invested approximately $20 billion in AI over the past five years.
The maker of the iPhone has made no secret about its ambitions to become a leader in the space, indicating it will spend upwards of $5 billion in 2025 to further integrate the new technology into some of its most popular ecosystems, such as iOS.
But not everybody is on board, at least not yet.
Apple’s artificial intelligence product, Apple Intelligence, hasn’t caught on with many of its iPhone users. Currently, the product is largely used to summarize texts and other messages or help folks wade through their countless notifications.
But Apple Intelligence is a resource-heavy product. And as it ramps up its capabilities, it takes up more storage. In September 2024, Apple Intelligence required just 4 GB of storage. Now, just four months later, that figure has nearly doubled to around 7 GB of storage. And iPhone users are not happy.
“Does anyone else feel like Apple Intelligence is worthless?” one user asked on the iPhone subreddit. “The only real difference I’ve seen is the change in graphics when you are talking to Siri. Apple’s voice command already lagged behind the offerings of other major companies and this just seems to be no improvement whatsoever.”
“I don’t expect much out of Siri yet. It’s new and it’s rough but I have hope. She actually responds sometimes instead of just searching the internet,” another commenter wrote.
“I find the notification summaries pretty useful for skimming thru notifications from group chats or multiple emails quickly,” another wrote.
“I find them spectacularly incorrect,” one user responded.
A recent survey found that 73% of iPhone users find “little to no value” in Apple Intelligence.
So, while some customers find Apple Intelligence’s capabilities convenient, pesky problems like storage issues and battery drainage might outweigh the convenience, at least for now.
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