He’s credited as the “father of the iPod,” a co-creator of the iPhone, and the founder of Nest, the smart thermostat company acquired by Google. Even if they did, most people have never had an assistant and know how they would use — or grow to trust — a personal robot helper. When you hire a human assistant, you’re not giving them your bank account login on day one.
We’re heading into a world where anyone can have a personal AI assistant, but these tools are only valuable if we can trust them to be completely secure. At this point, establishing trust with an AI assistant seems even harder than relying on a human. Meta recently launched Muse, its all-purpose AI assistant, but users have reason to be wary.
A security researcher quickly found a serious vulnerability in Muse after launch, and a recent 404 Media report states that some Meta employees discovered security issues that prompted multiple teams to embark upon a “mad dash” to fix these problems before launch, working overtime. Apple has all the hardware, they have all the chips, they have all the pieces, but they don’t have all the AI stuff.” Even if it’s not Apple that ultimately produces the stickiest AI agent, Fadell predicts that a successful agent will have to operate on-device only, both for the sake of privacy and to keep the tech lightweight. I’ve seen this play out in the internet days and what have you.
We have so much power on the device now, and even more compute, and they’re still battery operated.” By keeping sensitive data on-device, rather than transmitting it through the cloud, Apple has garnered trust from users to share their biometric data through features like Face ID. As Fadell notes, Apple seems to have more goodwill with consumers than its competitors when it comes to privacy, but unlike other top tech companies, Apple doesn’t have a world-class AI model of its own — the new Siri AI runs on custom-built versions of Google’s Gemini. While Apple lags in proprietary AI, it is leaps ahead in hardware.
Fadell theorizes that companies like Meta and OpenAI are turning their attention toward gadgets because they don’t have billions of devices in circulation like Apple does. They’re like, ‘Oh, we’ll need video,’ and you have to check, ‘Yes, I’ll give you video.’ Then they say, ‘Well, we need audio.’ Check. And before you know it, it becomes a list of 20 things or more than you have then allowed them to have,” he said.
They go and make a device with all that stuff in it without a screen… and then they just Bluetooth or Wi-Fi into your phone and then back up to the web, or into a 5G network, so they can get all the sensor data.” Given his history creating the iPhone and iPod, it might seem like Fadell is still looking at his former employer through rose-colored glasses. While he may give Apple credit where due, he hasn’t been shy to call Apple out when he thinks they’re messing up. When an audience member asks about the luck involved in finding product-market fit, Fadell points out that it’s more difficult for startups to manufacture that luck, since a failed product can spell the end of the company.
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