The issue is that those previous promises were for a very short support window, and Google has a terrible track record for any sort of long term support.

Google supports Pixel? Sure.

Google supports anything for 7 years? Doubtful.

Mmm: https://killedbygoogle.com/

Tell that to my otherwise perfectly functioning OnHub router.

Never been so god damn mad, I got three devices replacing it that still can't match the consistent coverage that thing provided.

Who actually gives a crap about AI in real life?

I am no fan of AI-evangelists promising us the moon in the same vein as crypto-bros, but this is a truly bizarre take. I can tell you, and yes I am just one person, that over the last 3-4 years AI tools have fundamentally altered my work. I work in post-production for video/audio. Commercial, social media, documentary, narrative, you name it. There isn't a stage of my post pipeline now that doesn't integrate AI tools at some point. Adobe Audio Enhance fixes problematic (usually Zoom) audio with a click of a button in a way that used to take me days and countless hours. AI tools are making keying off of even the most mediocre green screen capture trivial (DaVinci Resolve has some wild integration on that front). AI tools are generating 90%+ accurate transcripts in a matter of minutes for me now. The list goes on.

I don't think you look at it from the right way.

AI is already in a lot of people's lifes and they don't even notice it's that.

From your keyboard word correction and prediction, to power management, smart image edition and categorising and more.

And some things are done locally on your phone.

The increase in AI capability on phones can allow more things to be done locally, and maybe even get something like a local LLM to predict what you want to type. (LLM = large language model, like chatgpt, bard, Llama and others, they can be used for more than just answering your questions).

The truth is there is little in terms of a use case that directly benefits the user.

Look at the MKBHD review of the new iPhone and he summarizes it pretty accurately when talking about all their super fancy backend bullshit going into the photo software to result in "slightly better pictures" and he wasn't even 100% sure about that part.

Apples Neural Engine delivered marginal value to the phones actual user and meanwhile the tech company harnessed that power mostly to do client-side scanning. They claimed to have ceased that effort but once again, blackbox proprietary software, so it isn't transparent to the user.

My contention is that at this point the big tech companies are developing features to benefit their business model, not deliver features to the users. The marketing and surveillance state grows, because that is the real business that these companies are in. Most of the AI gains we hear about benefit them directly but not us.

The same things people say about every new technology: computers, internet, smartphones etc. I use my smartphone very differently compared to 10 years ago. And apps which existed 10 years ago are very different now and require different HW. CPU progress is slowing, but AI focused hw could be the next wave.

Phones are basically game consoles nowadays, and AI is being used in render upscaling there

Most of the normal apps on the phone are using AI on the edges.

Image processing has come a long way using algorithms trained through those AI techniques. Not just the postprocessing of pictures already taken, like unblurring faces, removing unwanted background people, choosing a better frame of a moving picture, white balance/color profile or noise reduction, but also in the initial capture of the image: setting the physical focus/exposure on recognizable subjects, using software-based image stabilization in longer exposed shots or in video, etc. Most of these functions are on-device AI using the AI-optimized hardware on the phones themselves.

On-device speech recognition, speech generation, image recognition, and music recognition has come a long way in the last 5 years, too. A lot of that came from training on models using big, robust servers, but once trained, executing the model on device only requires the AI/ML chip on the phone itself.

In other words, a lot of these apps were already doing these things before on-device AI chips started showing up in 2013 or so. But the on-device chips have made all these things much, much better, especially in the last 5 years when almost all phones started coming with dedicated hardware for these tasks.

Complete opposite here. Typing this on an iPhone 8, and I’ve never retired a phone sooner than 4 years. Usually I give up around 6 due to lack of updates becoming a problem.

A longer support cycle would definitely sway my purchase decision.

Edit: though I am the type to replace batteries, buttons and screens myself as necessary

I have a different impression about new AI features backporting plans, but we will see. My point is that ai targeting HW can potentially drive the next smartphones evolution, which is slowed down currently.