Fadell, credited as the “father of the iPod” and a co-creator of the iPhone, projected an image of the three discontinued devices during his talk. He said the companies called and asked him to help, but he did not. “You have to really understand what you’re trying to do, what pain you’re trying to solve,” Fadell said. “In each of these cases, each one of them didn’t meet any kind of need.”
The devices promised personal AI assistants but struggled with reliability and trust. Fadell noted that fewer than 0.01% of the world's population has ever employed a human assistant, so most consumers do not know how to use or trust such a service. “It took me a couple of years first to understand how best to utilize [an assistant], and then to trust them with the most sensitive data,” he said. “There’s a lot of steps to get the general consumer and even the general business on this path.”
Trust in AI assistants faces additional challenges. Meta recently launched Muse, an all-purpose AI assistant, but a security researcher quickly found a serious vulnerability in the product. A report stated that some Meta employees discovered security issues before launch, prompting a “mad dash” to fix them with teams working overtime.
Fadell identified Apple as one of few companies potentially capable of building a trustworthy AI assistant, because Apple controls the hardware, chips, and ecosystem. He added, however, that Apple “doesn’t have all the AI stuff.”