Apple is at the forefront of claims to be a leading sustainable company. As well as its efforts on recycling and renewable power purchases, Apple is also adopting practices to promote reducing emissions by 75% across its entire business, manufacturing supply chain, and product life cycle by 2030, through innovations in design, engineering, and operations. Another pioneering area is to remove carbon from the atmosphere for the remaining 25% of its footprint, by investing in nature-based projects and carbon capture technologies.
The backdrop of a strong sustainable base is likely to underpin the company’s need to ramp up access to data centers and other devices as technology develops further. Apple is increasing its focus on Generative AI, with research on running large language models on smartphones. In general, companies like Apple and chipmakers are hoping that new AI features will help revive the smartphone market.
Despite launching one of the first virtual assistants, Siri, back in 2011, Apple needs to catch up to others in Silicon Valley especially since OpenAI launched its breakthrough chatbot ChatGPT. Apple’s research suggests that it will instead focus on AI that can run directly on an iPhone.
Apple’s rivals, such as Samsung, are gearing up to launch a new kind of “AI smartphone” next year. Counterpoint estimated more than 100mn AI-focused smartphones would be shipped in 2024, with 40 per cent of new devices offering such capabilities by 2027.
Qualcomm, the chip maker chief executive Cristiano Amon, forecast that bringing AI to smartphones would create a whole new experience for consumers and reverse declining mobile sales. More sophisticated virtual assistants will be able to anticipate users’ actions such as texting or scheduling a meeting, while devices will also be capable of new kinds of photo editing techniques.
Running large AI models that power ChatGPT or Google’s Bard on a personal device brings formidable technical challenges, because smartphones lack the huge computing resources and energy available in a data center. Solving this problem could mean that AI assistants respond more quickly than they do from the cloud and even work offline.
Optimizing LLMs to run on battery-powered devices has been a growing focus for AI researchers. Academic papers are not a direct indicator of how Apple intends to add new features to its products but they offer a rare glimpse into its secretive research labs and the company’s latest technical breakthroughs.
Next generation smartphones are likely to be the creator’s best friend; these devices will become portable creative studios able to write new program applications, gamification, social media management, reporting, journalism, documentary and film production etc. This will empower and generate a whole new segment of entrepreneurial creators who may also combine the smartphone device with their Electric Vehicle to become mobile creative arts studios. Such a development is going to be essential to continue to drive sales growth in mobile smartphone devices.
