iPhone (2007): Touch interface, GPS, camera, accelerometer → Instagram, Uber, Angry Birds
Steam (2004): Powerful PCs with broadband → complex multiplayer games
Gaming consoles: Custom chips → exclusive AAA games that drove platform adoption
VR headsets: Spatial tracking → immersive experiences impossible on phones
Smart TVs: Living room + remote → streaming apps optimized for 10-foot UI
Current AI "apps" are mostly glorified chat interfaces because they're constrained by cloud API limitations. You get text-in, text-out because that's what works over HTTP requests.
Companies are already recognizing this constraint:
Apple: New Macs ship with 16GB+ RAM standard, M-series chips with NPUs, explicit "AI PC" positioning
OpenAI: Just acquired io ($6.5B) - Jony Ive's AI hardware startup - the largest "acquihire" ever
Microsoft: Heavy investment in "AI PCs" with dedicated NPU requirements
Google: Pushing Gemini Nano for on-device processing
NVIDIA: Massive push into edge AI chips (Jetson, etc.)
But nobody has executed the full platform play yet: Hardware + killer first-party apps + developer ecosystem.
The pattern suggests AI needs local processing hardware to unlock the next generation of startups:
Real-time multimodal experiences (voice + vision + context)
Privacy-preserving personal AI that learns from your data
Instant response times (not 200ms+ cloud round trips)
Rich interactive experiences beyond conversation
Counterarguments:
"Web apps don't need special hardware" → But the most successful app stores do have hardware differentiation
"Current AI apps are making billions" → From early adopters; mass market adoption requires different UX
"Edge AI chips are shipping" → In laptops/enterprise, but no consumer platform has nailed the ecosystem play
The opportunity: The first startups/companies to ship consumer AI hardware with compelling pre-installed experiences, then open to developers.
Think: What would iPhone's app store have looked like if iOS shipped with only Safari?
Hardware investments suggest this isn't profound. The question is who executes the hardware strategy best.
marinmania•7mo ago
I honestly don't think it would save me that much time and for things an assistant would plausibly do (making purchases, planning vacations, responding to emails) I actually enjoy doing.