If the last few years have taught us anything, it's that the world of technology is changing even faster than many of us anticipated.
Consider everything we've seen change in the last five years.
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Before COVID-19, ordering almost everything online was not common. In 2019, about 11% of US retail sales were made online. But the pandemic changed that a lot. Now, many of us get everything from the essentials (like groceries and paper products) to the superfluous (like Christmas sweaters and Halloween costumes) online.
By 2028, Forrester predicts that 28% of all retail sales made in the US will be made online. That's a pretty big jump.
But our advances haven't just happened online, at least in stores.
Let's consider some of the other recent changes in the last five years. artificial intelligence is now a household name touted by many of our favorite phones and browsers. 5G is rolling out at a faster pace than ever. Autonomous and electric vehicles are no longer considered the product of the future; in fact, there's a good chance your next pizza delivery will be made in one. And augmented reality is one of the most coveted and complicated puzzles our largest social media companies are racing to solve.
Getty Images.
(Some users are skeptical)
While companies are making strides to capture more market share in the race for artificial intelligence, others have fallen behind or quickly lost consumer trust as they invest billions of dollars in startups.
Take MetaFB as an example. While the company's overall performance has been positive, CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg has worried investors in recent quarters with his perpetual enthusiasm for Meta Quest, his company's virtual reality headset that allows users to access your interactive metaverse. Reality Labs, the virtual reality subdivision of Meta, reported a loss of $3.7 billion in the third quarter of 2023. That's up 33% from a year ago.
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But Meta maintains that artificial intelligence is the future of its business, and that position is no exception among Silicon Valley incumbents.
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Another company well established in the artificial intelligence race is Apple (AAPL) which has invested approximately $20 billion in ai over the past five years.
The iPhone maker has made no secret of its ambitions to become a leader in the space, indicating that it will spend more than $5 billion in 2025 to further integrate the new technology 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 been successful with many of its iPhone users. Currently, the product is mainly used to summarize texts and other messages or to help people read their countless notifications.
But Apple Intelligence is a resource-intensive product. And as it increases its capacities, it takes up more storage. In September 2024, Apple Intelligence needed only 4 GB of storage. Now, just four months later, that figure has nearly doubled to around 7GB of storage. And iPhone users are not happy.
“Does anyone else feel like Apple Intelligence is worthless?” asked one user on the iPhone subreddit. “The only real difference I've seen is the change in graphics when you talk to Siri. Apple's voice command was already lagging behind offerings from other major companies and this just doesn't seem to be any improvement.”
“I'm not expecting much from Siri yet. It's new and difficult, but I'm hopeful. In fact, sometimes it responds instead of just searching the internet,” another commenter wrote.
“I find the notification summaries quite useful for quickly flipping through notifications from group chats or multiple emails,” wrote another.
“I find them spectacularly incorrect,” one user responded.
A recent survey found that 73% of iPhone users find “little or no value” in Apple Intelligence.
So while some customers find Apple Intelligence's capabilities convenient, annoying issues like storage issues and battery drain may outweigh the convenience, at least for now.
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