Expectations from iPhone 16 keynote, India’s tablet market and OpenAI investment

There are very few certainties in life, and one of those is Apple setting a new benchmark for smartphones every September. If you are an enthusiast for misinformed opinions, spending time on Twitter (force of habit) to curate your world view, you’d likely subscribe to a thought that “oh, Android has been doing this for years” every time new iPhones arrive in September. I’ve little fervour for an argument. The fact is, ever new iPhone sets a broader benchmark, which Android phone makers spend the next six months trying to match.
Not convinced? I was expecting that. Last year, Apple iPhone 15 Pro with a titanium build was followed by Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra and Xiaomi 14 Ultra, with titanium (not holding anything against Samsung or Xiaomi; but misinformed opinions). Aluminum was the earlier material of choice. Do we need to talk about iOS’ control center inspired layouts on many an Android phone? Or years to make something like Apple’s AirDrop? Or something akin to iPhone’s Live Activities? Do I need to go on? Glass houses, stones and all that…
Which brings me to what I originally wanted to speak with you about. The expectations from Apple’s keynote on September 9 (for a long time, X rumour mill insisted it’ll be September 10, based on wild guess work). Expecting four new iPhones – 16, 16 Plus, 16 Pro and 16 Pro Max. Could we, see an iPhone Mini return this year? It would make sense to do so from a pricing standpoint. The ‘Pro Max’ could switch from a 6.7-inch to a 6.9-inch display, but what are you really gaining? Potentially better in-app experience, if Apple’s able to keep the overall footprint in check. Could Apple try to refresh the naming, with perhaps an “iPhone Ultra”? We’ve heard about an ultra-slim one in the works for the next year and giving it the “Air” moniker wouldn’t be entirely amiss.
Apple Intelligence will be the keynote’s main talking point (read our deep dive here). The usual suite arriving with iOS 18 and iOS 18.1 – phone calls recorded and transcribed, email replies drafted, tools to proofread or change language, Notes app with maths skills. Beyond that, responses to queries such as “show me the document which XYZ sent me a few days ago” or “can I finish the 4pm meeting and be in time for the 5:15pm meeting” will be possible owing to deep integration within iOS – that’s something regular AI assistants cannot do.
Amidst all that excitement about Apple Intelligence, many (mostly with limited attention spans) have forgotten Apple Watch completes 10 years. I’d say it is very unlikely if we just have another Watch without much fanfare. But for any significant change to happen to the Apple Watch, we’ll likely have to collectively agree to the pain point of a redesign that’ll make existing band accessories incompatible.
AirPods are likely to move into the fourth generation this year, and standard true wireless earbuds likely to be joined by the latest gen AirPods Pro buds as well. More mysterious however are the AirPods Max headphones, which haven’t been refreshed in four years (and therefore, the Lightning port). Either a new version can be classified as long overdue, or Apple may have shelved it for good. Either way, we’ll know on September 9. HT will be covering the keynote in detail, analysing what exactly the announcements mean for you. Do stay tuned.

India’s tablet market is showing signs of life. And quite resoundingly, while at it. Some of you may remember we’d spoken about the CyberMedia Research (CMR) Tablet PC India Market Report Review for Q2 2024. Now it is the turn of International Data Corporation’s (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Personal Computing Device Tracker. The takeaway is that shipments of 1.84 million units in Q2 2024 representing a 128.8% improvement in year-on-year numbers. In the same quarter last year, tablet shipments in India were around the 808 thousand. The other big thing is tablet makers seem to have found a formula that works. The price band is between ₹20,000 and ₹30,000 and powerful specs that allow these tabs versatility of use, are proving key.
The latest generation chips, and bigger displays that are a norm, help with that. In the past few months, my experience with the OnePlus Pad Go and subsequently with the 2024 lineup including Xiaomi’s Redmi Pad Pro 5G and the Honor Pad 9, testifies that this approach is working. These tablets are quite unlike Android tablets of the yesteryears, which struggled in more ways than one. It is not just the hardware, but software too is seeing improvements. Google may have done precious little; it has been up to tablet makers to overlay software with their smartness. Samsung, OnePlus and Xiaomi have stood out, though others aren’t too far behind.
To be fair, I haven’t kept up with movie piracy platforms for many years. But the problem clearly is still rampant. At least going by the excitement of the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE) which has helped the Vietnamese Police shutter a platform called Fmovies. It was based in the country, and is believed to have been quite popular, with an ecosystem of websites including bflixz, flixtorz, movies7, myflixer and aniwave. Data suggests Fmovies has been around since 2016 and was clocking close to 374 million monthly visits. It hasn’t been a good month for piracy platforms, with Megaupload founder Kim Schmitz (you’d know him as Kim Dotcom) extradited to the US. Megaupload may well be classified as the posterchild of online piracy in the 2010s, though the likes of the incredibly popular rapidshare, megaupload and megavideo may have something to say about that.
A week earlier, my Tech Tonic column (read the premium piece here) discussed how tech companies and AI companies are using smart acquisitions to find a way to dominate the artificial intelligence race. I reference that now, because Nvidia and Apple have been in the news. They’re planning major investments in OpenAI. Microsoft too is expected to make fresh investments into the AI company, on which it relies for the underlying foundations for its Copilot product (Microsoft owns as much as 49% stake with around $13 billion investment since 2019, that’s how invested they already are).
Apple’s investment plans shouldn’t surprise anyone. Apple Intelligence, which rolls out in a few days from now, finds OpenAI’s GPT models are an important part of the overall suite – though not the only one. Mind you, there is always chatter about Apple’s possible conversations with Google for Gemini, as well as AI startups Anthropic and Perplexity. For Nvidia, which is dominating AI chips but as the likes of AMD, Intel and Qualcomm are very much fighting back, this investment should provide much-needed momentum. Many a tech company relies on Nvidia’s hardware for their AI processes, but that market is showing its first signs of slowing down – I had written in March about how AMD, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and Google are getting in on the AI chip game, on the infrastructure side of things. Nvidia’s chips have for long commanded a premium price tag and long waiting periods.
Interestingly, the complexity of convergence is playing out rather quickly – chip manufacturer TSMC’s upcoming A16 Angstrom 1.6-nanometer process node will be ready for chip production sometime in 2026, and OpenAI is expected to be in the queue with its chip plans. After all, they’ve a lot to power, including the ever-improving Sora video generative AI as it gets ready for primetime, and the next GPT model that’ll have Ph.D. level intelligence.
Big numbers: Good time to talk about some usage stats that OpenAI has shared this week. They say ChatGPT now has 200 million weekly active users – to put this in trajectory perspective, OpenAI had said 100 million weekly active users in November last. The API usage too (that’s the application programming interface; used by third-party apps) has doubled since the very capable GPT-4o was released this July.