With the holiday season approaching, the three leading consumer technology companies are promoting improved personal assistants and faster on-device chips as they push new laptops, tablets, phones and smart home computers.
Apple unveiled the HomeView, an iPad-like device designed to hang on walls or sit on tabletops, showcasing its AI-upgraded Siri assistant at a smart home products launch in New York City on October 13. Microsoft began taking preorders for an Nvidia-powered Windows laptop starting at $2,599, built around an AI chip called RTX Spark that can run demanding AI tasks without relying on the cloud. Amazon followed with the release of its Alexa tablets.
Success is far from guaranteed. Consumer sentiment is at its weakest in 12 years, largely due to stubborn inflation, and fears about the potential safety risks of AI are growing. Hardware prices have risen across the board, driven by soaring costs for components, particularly memory and storage, as power-hungry AI servers consume much of the available capacity. Those price increases have contributed to plunging shipments of smartphones and laptops this year.
Jitesh Ubrani, an analyst at IDC, said the companies want to introduce AI to consumers to lay the groundwork for more aggressive device launches in the coming years.
"This is really about getting devices into consumers' hands, into consumers' homes, slowly teaching them how to use it, and getting feedback from them," Ubrani said, adding that the new gadgets are not expected to sell in large volumes, at least not yet.
Given the macroeconomic headwinds, winning over affluent early adopters now may be considered a success in itself.