Apple has not yet introduced gen-AI features for the iPhone.
Greg Bruce is an award-winning senior multimedia journalist for the NZ Herald and writes features, profiles, reviews and essays on a range of subjects.
OPINION
The iPhone was the only smartphone I’d ever used and the only smartphone I’d ever wanted. For nearly 15 years,it had been part of my mind and body, to the point where my swipings and scrollings were no longer under my conscious control.
This, of course, was exactly what Apple wanted: for its users to form such strong attachments to its flagship product that trying to buy a competitor’s lame-name device (“Galaxy”) would create enough friction to start a fire in our brains, destroying the few remaining parts not already controlled by our iPhones.
And then in February this year, I received an invitation from a PR agency to try the new Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra. I would normally have disregarded such an invitation with a scoff, but this one came with an opening line that was so perfectly tailored to my interests I found it impossible to ignore: “Do you ever wonder how can AI fit any more seamlessly into your daily life?”
A couple of weeks after receiving the invitation, I sat next to a floor-to-ceiling window in a cool city-fringe office and watched, agog, as a Samsung marketing exec used a Galaxy S24 Ultra to make an audio recording of our conversation, then converted it instantly to text with a single tap on the screen.
As a journalist who has spent whole days and sometimes even weeks transcribing recordings, this feature alone was enough to make me want to slap my maxed-out credit card straight down on the boardroom table alongside the S24 Ultra and ask for three.
But the exec was not done. With another tap on the screen, she turned the transcription into a bullet-pointed summary. I was slack-jawed with delight. I wanted it, and I wanted it now.
Still she was not done. She opened a web browser and navigated to some long-winded article like this one, tapped the bottom of the screen and the entire thing was reduced to a pithy and, presumably excellent, summary. On and on she went, through feature after feature: tapping on photos to remove unwanted elements; tapping on notes to create summaries, translating a phone conversation in real time; circling images on the screen so the phone would automatically search for them on the web.
The world was changing before my eyes, and I was shocked to discover Apple was not the one doing the changing. The company was making vague promises about its own AI features, but as of this writing, nearly nine months later, they are still just promises. For a company whose most famous advertising campaign advised us to “think different” and be visionaries, mavericks and rebels, it looked awfully like its mouth had written cheques its ass was no longer able to cash.
I’d had enough. I had a life to optimise and time that needed saving and Apple was no longer the rational choice to help me achieve those goals. So, a few weeks ago, I did the unimaginable and started using a family member’s hand-me-down Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra. It was not the model I had tested earlier this year – it was the generation immediately preceding it – but it used the same software and had the same AI features and was quite a step up from my iPhone 8.
The launch of the new iPhone 16 at an innovation event at the company's headquarters. Photo / Getty Images
I had worried about losing my valuable data and all my embodied understanding of the iPhone, but it was preposterously easy to switch. I used a Samsung app that pulled all my data over from my iPhone and was using the Galaxy S23 Ultra within minutes.
Sure, I had to embody some new swipings and tappings, but I was so in love with the phone, our initial fumblings were more exciting than frustrating.
I set about using every AI function I could get my hands on, summarising webpages, conversations and notes, manipulating photos, transcribing recordings, live-translating phone conversations. What a time it was to be alive.
Yes, I had some minor withdrawal symptoms as my fingers pined embarrassingly for the iPhone, but I refused to give in to them, and within a week or two I was using my new phone far more effectively, and with more joy, than I had ever used my old one.
I was filled with excitement at all the rich and terrible possibilities of technology, in a way I had not been filled by Apple’s products for many years. Together, I felt like the Galaxy and I could do something big and important, maybe even something that would push the human race forward and/or change the world.
The fact we have not yet done so – the fact we have done little more than edit some photos and make summaries of conversations with my wife for my personal entertainment – is neither the point nor the fault of the Samsung S23 Ultra.
