To his later point about wireless networking, it’s true that wireless enabled a whole bunch of new mobile apps. But AI is not just a supporting technology. It’s inseparable from the new products that it enables. Makes sense to build new devices around AI assistants in particular.
I don’t see it myself. I think people like using their phones too much for a complete wholesale replacement. If I could take the tiller of the Ship of Theseus for a moment, I reckon if it does come to pass, it’d be closer to what happened to Ethernet: Apple replaces the AppKit layer with a whole new AI-based interaction model, but it would still be called the iPhone. Maybe it’d still be called iOS. I guess they could call it SiriOS, if that brand wasn’t already tarnished (or they weren’t being “serious” 😛).