When you visit a Best Buy or Croma store in 2026, the salesperson will no longer bring up megapixels. They will discuss TOPS, or trillions of operations per second, a figure that most consumers are unable to comprehend but are nevertheless expected to be concerned about. It’s a minor but significant change that reflects a broader trend in the industry: the long-dormant smartphone wars have resurfaced, but this time the weapons aren’t cameras or screen sizes. The battlefield has shifted inside the chip itself, and they are neural processing units.
It wasn’t this silent all the time. Steve Jobs once threatened to launch a “thermonuclear war” over Android because he believed Google had completely appropriated Apple’s concepts. Lawsuits over Samsung’s early Galaxy phones continued for almost ten years before a 2018 settlement finally put an end to the controversy. Following that, the industry settled into something less exciting: yearly updates, small camera upgrades, button renaming here, core addition there. Smartphones are already owned by billions of people. Not much remained to be fought over.
The numbers reflect this complacency. Canalys reports that shipments decreased by 4% in 2023, and Assurant’s data revealed that consumers were keeping devices for about three and a half years rather than the one to two-year cycle that carriers had previously relied on. It’s difficult to hold anyone accountable for shrugging. Why rush to upgrade when the main feature of the iPhone 15 Pro was replacing a physical switch with a button?
The incentive structure was quickly altered by generative AI. These days, companies like Apple, Samsung, Google, Qualcomm, MediaTek, and others are competing to install ever-larger language models directly on the device, operating locally and never coming into contact with a server. According to reports, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 accelerates its Hexagon NPU by 37% compared to its predecessor. According to rumors, Apple’s A19 Pro will have a 40-core neural engine designed to meet Apple Intelligence’s more specific requirements. A night-mode photo can be processed by MediaTek’s Dimensity 9500 in less than 80 milliseconds without the need for a cloud. All of this has a subtle one-upmanship to it, with each company claiming in its own technical jargon that its silicon comprehends you more quickly than the others’.
Whether customers will take notice or care, as these businesses hope, is still uncertain. The majority of people don’t think in TOPS. “Does my phone feel smarter than it did last year?” is what they consider. By combining Gemini, Perplexity, and its own Bixby into a single device, Samsung appears to be placing a wager on breadth.
This approach offers consumers choices but runs the risk of appearing like three unfinished concepts rather than a single, self-assured one. As usual, Apple has become more focused and controlled, keeping almost everything on-device and sending only the most difficult tasks to its Private Cloud Compute servers, all the while discreetly relying on Google’s Gemini for the logic that Apple’s own models are still unable to handle. The fact that two competitors are sharing infrastructure just because they don’t want to be left out of the upcoming decade says something.
Cristiano Amon of Qualcomm, on the other hand, has been telling anyone who will listen that the phone is a transitional device. He referred to 2026 as “the year of agents,” and he means it somewhat literally: AI systems that operate in the background, making reservations and making decisions, with the phone becoming just one endpoint among many, along with glasses, cars, and even pendants. It remains to be seen if that future materializes by 2028, as he proposes, or if it takes much longer, as these device categories frequently do. Smart glasses have previously been promised and discreetly shelved.
Observing this develop gives me the impression that the industry is aiming for something greater than a sales cycle. This isn’t really about phones at all; rather, it’s about who controls computing at every scale, from a wrist to a warehouse, according to Qualcomm’s new Dragonfly chips, which are directly aimed at Nvidia’s data center business. In other words, the smartphone wars might only be the outward manifestation of a much bigger conflict. The last one was decisively won by Apple. As of yet, no one is placing a wager on the outcome.
