As you may already know if you read us this Monday, yesterday was the tenth anniversary of the iPhone or, rather, the day they presented the smartphone that changed mobile telephony. These days, many media are talking about how they lived that moment, something that also made Steven Levy on the Backchannel blog, where he has also included an interview he did with the VP of hardware, among other things, Apple: Phil Schiller.
In the interview, Schiller spoke about Alexa, Amazon's personal assistant that is receiving such good reviews, to imply that the best personal assistant is the one that is always with you and that we cannot eliminate the value of a color screen to present certain information from the equation. This he said because Alexa is an assistant who works and answers only with voice, without any screen in between.
Phil Schiller says Apple never stops innovating
When it comes to innovation, the Apple Vice President says that changes and improvements are always there:
I think our expectations are to change more, not the jumps in the products. If you look through each version - from the original iPhone to the iPhone 3G to the iPhone 4 or 4S, you see big changes in all of them. You see screen size changes from three and a half inches to four inches to four point seven inches and five point five. You see cameras going through incredible changes, from the first camera that couldn't record video, to later having both a front camera and a rear camera, to now three cameras with the things we're doing, and with Live Photos and 4K video.
Schiller missed the opportunity to talk about how the iPhone continues to lead the industry, ten years later, mentioning "unsurpassed" quality, integration and ease of use, but does mention that competition forces them to keep releasing better and better products.
The interview also talked about what to expect for the next 50 years, for which Schiller says he hopes people will look back at right now and say:
Wow, they didn't realize how much still had to go - in fact, others failed because they were busy looking around for other things. Everyone has their opinions on this, but it could be that we are only in the first minutes of the first quarter of the game. I think this product is so great that it has many years of innovation ahead.
Google Home
Returning to the topic of personal virtual assistants, Schiller says that a team was formed to create Crab several years ago for his debut with the iPhone 4S and that he believes that Apple can «do more with that conversational interface than anyone else«, Something that I personally think is true, but only in part.
With respect to products such as Amazon Echo, Schiller says that «Having my iPhone with me as a thing I talk to is better than something locked in my kitchen or on some wall somewhere.“But it doesn't mention something that is important to me: what about Siri when we're at home? The answer could be that we can talk to her with our iPhone or Apple Watch, but to use the smartphone 100% we would have to take it out of our pocket and the Siri version of the Apple Watch is a few steps behind the iPhone version, by no means mention that he has no voice. We also have a substitute for Siri on the Apple TV, but it is also very limited and does not respond to voice if we do not press a button designed for it.
Devices like Google Home o Alexa are made up of microphones and speakers without any visual component, which is why Apple's VP of Hardware says that «We still like to take photos and need to look at them, and a disembodied voice is not going to show me which photo it is.«. Do you agree with Schiller's words?