The past few days have seen conflicting views from AI companies about the future of smartphones. Perplexity thinks AI will only benefit iPhones, while OpenAI reportedly thinks its own smartphone can render them obsolete.
I would bet very heavily that the OpenAI smartphone will either never materialize or will be a commercial failure, but I still think the attempt is good news for iPhone users …
Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas doesn’t think AI presents a threat to iPhone; quite the reverse.
Here’s my opinion. I haven’t said this before. The phone, the iPhone is actually not getting disrupted by AI at all. In fact, the more AI works better, the iPhone essentially becomes your digital passport.
He says the iPhone is central to the ways in which we live our lives, and that isn’t going to change.
If a Ming-Ching Kuo report is accurate, OpenAI disagrees with this assertion. He suggests the company is working on its own smartphone.
OpenAI is working with MediaTek and Qualcomm to develop smartphone processors, with Luxshare as the exclusive system co-design and manufacturing partner. Mass production is expected in 2028.
The company’s concept is that the operating system will be based on AI agents instead of apps. In other words, you won’t open a specific app to achieve a task – instead, you will delegate the task to an AI agent.
In principle, I think OpenAI is correct in its belief that human beings have tasks they want to achieve, and that apps are simply one possible tool we can use.
I’d love to be able to simply pick up my iPhone, tell Siri what it is I actually want to achieve and then receive confirmation a few seconds or minutes later that the task has been done. For example, tell Siri to book a trip, knowing that it has all my preferences for airlines, plane seats, hotels, etc; that it is able to apply my frequent flyer miles to the trip; that it has access to my diary to ensure the timings work; and so on.
I do think we will get there eventually, and once we do then the concept of human-accessed apps will be at least partly redundant. However, this certainly isn’t going to be by 2028! Given the schoolboy errors made by AI systems at present, it will be a very long time indeed before I will trust an agent to do anything important for me, let alone anything as ambitious as taking care of travel plans.
Even when it does eventually happen, this doesn’t mean that we’re going to abandon our iPhones. The Apple ecosystem will become even more important in this kind of interconnected world, and the appeal of the iPhone maker’s approach to privacy will only increase.
However, although I think an OpenAI smartphone would flop, I would be very happy indeed to see the company make the attempt. It’ll accelerate the process of moving beyond apps and into Agentic AI delegated tasks, and it’ll push Apple to go further and faster in this direction.
We won’t be giving up our iPhones, but they will get smarter, faster with this kind of competitive pressure.
Photo by Andrey Matveev on Unsplash
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