It's iPhone 16 day ("it's Glowtime")

Well then, here we go again.

The all-new iPhone 16 is due to be announced later today with the usual Apple fanfare.

iPhone 15 was the first iPhone launch that I have intentionally sat out. I didn't bother. I didn't feel compelled.

Every single time a new iPhone launched, I bought it, no questions asked.

Yes, it was routinely ridiculous. I remember when I got the iPhone 14... it felt almost laborious having to do the swap from the older model to that one.

It wasn't a joyous experience filled with wonder.

It was another 1,200 GBP expense that I didn't particularly enjoy.

It was nice to have a new phone.

Meh.

I told myself it was for the camera.

Because the Apple launch videos always show off about how many hundreds of percent better the camera is on this model versus the last.

But I have to tell you, dear reader, I couldn't possibly explain to you the benefits of iPhone 14 over the model I upgraded from (the year before).

I can't remember. I don't know. It wasn't obvious. Maybe it actually was a demonstrably better camera.

It didn't really matter, because I was buying it anyway.

But now.

Every now and again I look at my OLD iPhone and I feel smug: I feel happy I didn't need to go through the pain of transferring and upgrading and making all of those various security and bank apps actually work.

It should be different this time

This launch, however, should be different. Apple is definitely behind the curve when it comes to AI experience. We're all super-advanced already with our use of various LLMs. Expectations are incredibly high.

Siri, as I experience it today, is a bunch of rubbish (technical term) compared to what you can access for free from the likes of OpenAI, Anthropic and more. The on-device experience with Apple (and, by the way, other devices too) is utterly divorced from the exponential journey we've all been on, individually and collectively, with the likes of Copilot, ChatGPT, etc.

The device experience has effectively stood still. Yes, I see some interesting movements from Samsung and Google.

So I am very interested, this time, to actually watch the Apple videos and see what they've been doing with the 'new Siri'.

The 'Glowtime' concept, I take, is a reference to the way that Siri will appear and magically do stuff for me, I presume.

So I'm excited.

Let us see what Apple has been cooking up.

In case you need a reminder, you can watch it all at www.apple.com.