B ling is in the air. On September 9th Apple released its latest iPhone 16 series at an event called “It’s Glowtime”. The name referred to the s

AI will not fix Apple’s sluggish iPhone sales any time soon

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2024-10-10 21:00:06

B ling is in the air. On September 9th Apple released its latest iPhone 16 series at an event called “It’s Glowtime”. The name referred to the sheen around Siri, its souped-up voice assistant. But it was just as appropriate for the new colour of its snazziest iPhone 16 Pro model: “desert titanium”—in other words, gold.

A bit lacking, though, was zing. Tim Cook, Apple’s boss, played up the promise of the phones’ generative artificial-intelligence (AI) features, which he trailed with much hoopla in June under the moniker “Apple Intelligence”. Although the devices come with Apple’s new superfast A18 chips to power AI, iPhone buyers will have to wait until at least October for the first features. The demos look ho-hum. If you point the camera at a restaurant, Apple Intelligence can tell you what’s on the menu. You can type a request to Siri, as well as ask it questions. Investors hope that eventually more conversational and personalised AI features will reboot iPhone sales, which account for about half of Apple’s revenues but have sagged lately (see chart). They could be waiting a while.

Apple is one of many firms that want to take generative AI beyond giant data centres, known as the cloud, and run it on smaller devices, known as the edge. Samsung, Apple’s main smartphone rival, got a head start, launching its Galaxy S24 with some AI features earlier this year. So did Microsoft, which has launched Windows PCs designed for AI, called Copilot+. But by and large the market is still up for grabs. Cracking it will not be easy.