Why the Phone is the Best AI Device

It’s hard to believe, but 18 years after the iPhone first hit store shelves, people still line up outside Apple stores whenever a new model first becomes available. We saw that again on Friday, when the iPhone 17 series went on sale. As we reported earlier, preorders for the entry-level iPhone 17—the cheap one—were strong enough to prompt Apple to order a quick ramp-up in production for that model. And yet, the would-be iPhone killers are pouring ever-increasing amounts of money into that effort.

Meta Platforms, for instance, is betting on eyeglasses eventually supplanting phones as people’s main device. On Wednesday evening, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg stood on stage at the company’s Connect event to proclaim that “glasses are the only form factor where you can let AI see what you see, hear what you hear and talk to you throughout the day.” Really? What about a phone? You can point Google’s Gemini at something through its Live feature and have it help you figure things out. Don’t just take my word for it. On Thursday’s TITV, wearables analyst Ben Bajarin said: “If anybody‘s ever used Google Gemini with live video where you can … just show your camera to Gemini and expose anything that it’s seeing and have a conversation about it, that is probably easily the best experience I've ever had of a multimodal AI experience.”