When Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone in 2007 it marked the beginning of the smartphone era. Now there’s speculation that frustration with our devices and a new AI project from legendary Apple designer Jony Ive could bring it to an end. Rima Sabina Aouf reports.

It’s hard to picture life without the smartphone. For most of us, it is not just a communication device, but our only photo album, our password vault, our banking portal, our portable media player and much more.

Its primacy in our lives is unprecedented by any other physical object, and the device itself has changed little since Jobs walked on stage at MacWorld 18 years ago. The same slim, rectangular design dominated by a scrollable black screen and single-function apps persists.

The smartphone has changed little since the first iPhone in 2007

Last year saw a spate of artificial intelligence (AI)-led product launches that sought to challenge this paradigm. Almost all were flops.

But last month, the announcement from iPhone designer Ive and the world’s leading dedicated AI company, OpenAI, that they are partnering on a new “family of products” suddenly made it seem much more likely that the smartphone’s days are numbered.

“It’s the talk of the town,” said designer Gadi Amit, who with his San Francisco-based studio New Deal Design has watched 20 years of gamechanging devices come and go.

Known for his technology product design, Amit was behind one of the world’s first successful wearables, the Fitbit, plus Google’s much-anticipated but ultimately abandoned modular smartphone, Project Ara.

Does he think the smartphone era is coming to an end?

“AI is changing user interface patterns, and with that, the quote-unquote attention economy is, in my view, coming to an end,” Amit told Dezeen.

“The object itself as a mobile miniature computer in one way or another will stay with us, but the big question is whether we need a large screen and whether we interact with that mobile unit in a different way.”

“What we know now as an iPhone probably won’t be as it is 10 years from now.”

AI companies look for alternative to “being bombarded” with notifications

AI companies have made it clear that they have the smartphone’s user experience in their sights.

“I don’t feel good about my relationship with technology right now,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in an interview with the New York Times to announce the partnership with Ive.

“It feels a lot like being jostled on a crowded street in New York, or being bombarded with notifications and flashing lights in Las Vegas.”

His sentiment is echoed by the likes of Meta, which is betting heavily that its AI augmented-reality glasses can make interacting with tech “more useful, usable and beautiful”, and start-ups like Rabbit, still active despite the lacklustre reception to its first product, the R1.

Rabbit’s R1 is one of several AI devices that launched last year

Some of these companies explicitly link their goals with AI hardware to a utopian vision of “ambient computing” – an idea that started in the 1990s with American computer scientist Mark Weiser, who described a world of “calm technology” where computers are everywhere but “invisible” and “disappear into the background”.

In contrast to Altman’s description of fighting overwhelm in a chaotic city, Weiser insisted that using technology could be as relaxing “as taking a walk in the woods”.

AI was not necessary to Weiser’s vision, but many technologists view it as the missing piece in the puzzle because of its potential to free users from screens and typing. AI agents could complete tasks, knowing what users want through natural language, AI vision, neural interfaces or some combination of these.

Meta believes its AI glasses are the perfect tool for this shift.

Meta’s latest partnership for its AI glasses is with Oakley

“Wearables are uniquely positioned for users to be able to share what they see and hear with friends and family, acting as a first-person viewpoint that enhances what you experience in your day-to-day world,” a company representative told Dezeen.

“There are already 1 to 2 billion people who wear glasses on a daily basis. Just like everyone who upgraded to smartphones, the belief at Meta is that everyone who has glasses is pretty quickly going to upgrade to smart glasses over the next decade.”

For now, smartphone companies are integrating AI into their existing offerings. Google is moving fast, ever adding new AI functions into its Android operating system and Pixel devices, while Samsung is evolving the Galaxy phone into “a true AI companion”, and Apple is taking a more tentative approach.

Nothing CEO Carl Pei has predicted this is all leading to a situation where “the entire phone will only have one app”, the operating system, which handles all tasks.

“Creepy” AI products could be rejected

Despite his excitement about the opportunity to invent form factors for a major new technology, Amit is dubious that a new product category will take the lead soon.

Unlike in 2007, when the smartphone built on the mobile phone, there is no established AI assistant with a culture behind it, and he doubts that speech is the most natural way of interacting with technology for most people.

He thinks it might be more like self-driving cars than the iPhone – the start of a long period of experimentation and finessing rather than a sudden breakthrough.

“There’s a good chance that AI and physical AI will be in that state of looking for a business model, looking for the right application for many years,” said Amit.

There’s another way in which this moment differs from 2007: then, society was largely united in its embrace of the mobile phone. The concerns we now have about doomscrolling, data privacy and dwindling attention spans weren’t on anyone’s radar.

The same cannot be said of AI in 2025. Although 5 to 10 per cent of the world now uses ChatGPT weekly – a user base already somewhere between that of X and Instagram – public attitude surveys consistently show there is significant distrust of AI systems, chiefly around security, privacy and ethics.

And with a few minor exceptions, AI-led ambient technology devices are being conceived as not just all-knowing but all-seeing and always-listening.

They are more integrated with our private lives than the smartphones of today, not less, and in most cases created by the same companies that have built their business models on users’ data and attention.

The Humane AI Pin entered the market last year but has since ceased production

Could distrust of AI and Silicon Valley be a barrier to the adoption of an eventual AI uberdevice?

Design futurist and innovation researcher Sarah Housley thinks it’s a possibility. She points out that there is precedent for the public rejecting the vision sold to them by big tech companies, even when they have made the rollout sound inevitable.

“Twelve years ago, this happened with Google Glass,” said Housley. “If a product seems intrusive, unethical or creepy, we can reject it.”

To this day, no wearable with a front-facing camera like Ray-Ban Meta or the Humane AI Pin has entered the mainstream.

Special Projects is known for its work with calm technology

Designer Adrian Westaway, a co-founder of the studio Special Projects, is a long-time champion of ambient and calm technology and has worked on related concept projects with Google, Samsung and even, 15 years ago, BlackBerry. He is wary of the products we might see in the coming years.

“The important thing isn’t the presence or absence of a screen, it’s the intent behind the device,” said Westaway. “For instance, you can now buy screenless wearable pins that record all your conversations and provide AI-powered summaries.”

“This is technically ‘ambient’, but whether it’s beneficial or just plain creepy depends entirely on the company’s intent. What are they doing with that data? How transparent are they being? A device can be screenless and still be incredibly intrusive.”

“People want technology that respects them and enables their humanity, rather than trying to capture and commodify it.”

A splintering tech culture

The technologists leading Silicon Valley companies, however, may not be concerned about whether people “like” AI or not.

It is “irrelevant”, says Serve Robotics CEO Ali Kashani, whose company is one of the few with a successful physical AI product: cute, cart-like robots that have been delivering takeaways on the streets of American cities since 2022.

“No one is ordering food and waiting for robots thinking that they’re ’embracing AI’; they’re just eating their lunch,” Kashani told Dezeen. “That’s usually how these things work.”

“At the end, what’s under the hood is mostly hidden, and [people] don’t really care what it is that delivers that value,” said Kashani.

Serve’s robots deliver takeaway food

After a period of great universality in the way we interface with technology, we could now see more fragmentation, where different people interact with their personal mini computers in different ways.

Enthusiasts might embrace glasses or other wearables – and eventually neural implants – while others will try to minimise their tech use, and the majority will fall somewhere in between.

It’s possible the diversification will extend to rediscovering the pleasure of charismatic objects designed to do different things.

Westaway sees the emergence of premium “dumbphones” like the Light Phone and limited-function devices like the reMarkable tablet as an important counter-trend that will start to peel away bigger sections of the market and shape the culture.

The Light Phone is a minimalist alternative to the smartphone with limited functions

“We’re now beginning to see the great convergence that created the smartphone starting to reverse,” he said. “Instead of one monolithic device that does everything, we might have two or three objects that serve different, more focused purposes.”

“This might seem inefficient from a purely technological standpoint, but it makes a lot more human sense.”

For his part, Kashani won’t dare predict what form of personal device will become the new norm. He believes “we sometimes get carried away” speculating about new technology before we know its limits.

“In a long enough time frame, it does change everything,” he said. “But usually not the way we thought it would.”

The main photo is by Dong Xu via Unsplash.

Dezeen In Depth
If you enjoy reading Dezeen’s interviews, opinions and features, subscribe to Dezeen In Depth. Sent on the last Friday of each month, this newsletter provides a single place to read about the design and architecture stories behind the headlines.

The post The twilight of the smartphone appeared first on Dezeen.