The whole selling point of Apples AI stuff is that the processing for most things can be done on the phone and thus your private data won't have to leave you device
I fully expect remote solutions to smoke local options
Once you include the all the network overhead of sending images/video files to a server and back over a not very fast connection, I suspect it will be closer than you think for most real world use cases. And even if a cloud solution can improved the overall performance from say 4 seconds to 2 seconds, I don't see that as a huge win overall.
All that being said Apple does also offer an AI cloud compute solutions for operation too heavy to run on the phone.
Except what would have been a Mac mini plugged into your router is now handheld and way less janky than needing the user to maintain two separate devices.
The phone doesn't have the memory/compute/cooling/or power budget to be a meaningful replacement for a desktop device which in turn doesn't hold a candle to the power or economy of doing it on the server side.
Herein privacy and utility are clearly in tension. The only sane thing to do is do it on the server but if you ARE going to do it locally doing it on a computer on the clients premises is the only way to actually do it because mobile devices power/compute/cooling/power budgets are so anemic whatever a synthetic benchmark says a device can do in the space of a moment or two.
I'm presuming that the ultimate strategy that a lot of players are going to actually follow is all server all the time wherein companies who are terribly concerned about privacy will rather than doing it locally do it on a server that they own.
It doesn’t need to be a desktop. The point is they make their phones overpowered because nighttime operations while on a charger need that extra juice.
The point of this subthread is directly and only in regards to AI. The original comment I replied to is thus
> The whole selling point of Apples AI stuff is that the processing for most things can be done on the phone and thus your private data won't have to leave you device
A desktop computer or server has substantially more power than an iphone even a nice one like the one which is the topic of the linked article because it has substantially more memory, power, cooling, and so forth.
I fully expect us to continue to rapidly expand what we can do with AI and such usages to require substantial resources to run wherein mobile devices will continue to be too grossly insufficient to run.
