Those Pixel phones intrigue me! iPhone has a "magic wand" feature in photos that makes each photo you take look better. I've often wondered why they don't just have a feature to turn it on permanently. Instead you have to hit the button for each photo—every time. I think since AI is still so new and potentially life-changing we're hyper-focused on all of the intellectual minutiae and ethical deliberations. This is good to evaluate and decide where our individual "line in the sand" is in terms of usage. As a larger society, soon we'll get beyond that phase and accept it as a tool. AI is already embedded into the background of our lives in so many ways that the average person doesn't realize—like photo/video editing, algorithms that influence our thinking and purchasing, it's used on every social media platform for various purposes, etc. I see advanced-AI tools like Grok bot being more widely accepted now. Some people are even trusting it to automate their financial portfolios (which I wouldn't do yet) and even partially run their businesses. We're stepping into a strange new future and the scary part is the picture of it is still so blurry.
I've been really impressed with all the Pixel phones I have owned. The times in between when I have went with something else, I immediately went back to a Pixel with my next phone. The one phone that came close to being as good as my Pixel, but not quite was the One+ that I had for a while. Those were much more attractive when they were trying to keep their prices low while still offering flagship features. That eventually went away. I think there will definitely be a point where some form of AI touches everything we do.
I remember you talking about your Pixel around the time I got my iPhone 15 Pro. It's getting harder and harder to justify paying the Apple premium as the competition continues to pull ahead. Yes, it's clear at this point that AI will be involved in every aspect of our daily lives. I'm still trying to wrap my head around what life will be like with no apps on our devices. People in the industry are saying AI-agents that run on our devices will take the place of all apps within the next few years.