Another day, another Samsung Galaxy S24 leak. Don’t worry: it will all stop soon, what with the official event just a couple of days away.
Today’s look into the very near future comes via Android Headlines, and largely concerns Samsung’s “I can’t believe it’s not Pixel” generative AI photo editor. Who cares about authenticity? Now you can doctor images at the touch of a button, just like in the picture below.
What could possibly go wrong?
The piece then reiterates the same camera specs we’ve heard before, but there’s an interesting new bit of new information at the end. It seems Samsung is set to only offer its Galaxy AI features “free of charge until at least 2025”. After that, it presumably hopes to charge for them.
Will it actually? Well, for now consider it an ambition, and the word “hopes” is doing a fair amount of heavy lifting. I hope to have lost a couple of stone by summer, but past form suggests that’s not going to happen.
Not that it’s particularly unfair for Samsung to try and charge for generative AI stuff done on its own servers, as some of its features apparently will be. Did you know that each ChatGPT request costs OpenAI around US$0.36 (~NZ$0.58) a pop? That means that, as of last April, the company was reportedly burning through US$700,000 (~NZ$1,130,924) a day.
By that metric, charging wouldn’t be unreasonable. But people often aren’t reasonable, especially when you’ve already charged them at least NZ$1,300 for a smartphone.
Remember that the generative AI photo editing seen above looks a lot like what’s currently available on the Pixel 8. Samsung charging for something that its rivals give away for free is just begging people to switch manufacturers when upgrade time rolls around.
Even when companies announce that a feature will one day cost money, they sometimes end up delaying, as Apple did with Emergency SOS. That was supposed to only last for two years on iPhone 14, but it has already been extended once and there’s still no pricing in sight.
All should become clear in just a few days. Samsung’s event is scheduled for this Wednesday in San Jose, which converts to Thursday 18th January at 7am NZDT for Kiwis.
Alternatively, you can just snooze your alarm and read all about it here instead.
