No I mean really powerful computer. iPhone 11 can handle quite complex tasks, people do real time face/expression tracking and mesh modelling, image processing, video editing and all kind stuff on this device.
iPhones have better hardware/software integration, which is easy for Apple to do because they control everything. They get better performance out of their hardware because of this.
It seems like they're using the iPhone for pretty much all intelligence, which makes sense. Custom embedded systems are non-trivial to design, manufacture, and bootstrap software for (I've been involved in some capacity with several). You'd save significant effort and trivially enable many more features by relying on something as powerful and mature as an iPhone.
I didn't say an iPhone was as good as a desktop with a dedicated graphics card. I said that an iPhone has a GPU and is capable of running a small but capable LLM.
Most people don't know that's possible yet.
Why do keep indicating that iPhones don't have a GPU?
Some people use their phone for things other than web surfing. Some examples: shooting high quality video. Taking high quality photos. For many people, the high quality phone has taken the place of a camera. The sub-$1000 digital camera can be replaced by iPhone. You can record music using GarageBand. An iPhone can also replace a Zoom recorder in many contexts. You can use an iPhone to measure rooms, plan furniture and even plan how paint will look on your walls with AR. You can create Keynote presentations pretty easily. You can create documents using Pages or update spreadsheets. You can use iPhone as a POS system: when I had a small hotel, we used iPhone to check in guests and take payments. I also occasionally use it to SSH into servers when I need to do something quick and I’m not at my computer. I use it to read books, so the screen quality does make a difference. The screen quality also makes a difference when editing photos.
The Civilizations AR App is pretty incredible and isn’t possible on low quality hardware. The Chalk AR app for live tech support is also not possible on a cheap Motorola. There are also “fun” aspects, like games, and the Dance Reality app that uses AR to teach dance steps. You can use iPhone to launch model rockets, control drones and a bunch of other cool things. Not everyone is going to care about all of this stuff, but for those that do, iPhone is far more than a websurfing, texting device. The criticism around why would anyone “need” so much power in a phone isn’t unlike the old days when nobody “needed” a hard drive or more than 16kb of RAM. Or a color screen. Or anything other than a dot matrix printer. These expensive phones are essentially supercomputers in your pocket; that people choose to use them for the proverbial solitaire isn’t the fault of the tech. It’s like people that use pocket calculators lamenting why anyone would ever need a Cray.
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