ADAM ENGST 22 May 2025

In a video dripping with so much mutual admiration that I found myself muttering “Get a room,” former Apple designer Jony Ive and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman have announced a collaboration to “create a family of devices that would let people use AI to create all sorts of wonderful things.” Ive’s hardware design company, io Products, will be acquired by OpenAI for $6.5 billion in stock, despite having only 55 employees and never having shipped anything. Ive and his team will oversee creative and design aspects across all OpenAI products, including ChatGPT and other apps.

Despite all the self-congratulatory Bay Area tech bro exaggeration, the announcement is not pure fluffery. ChatGPT—and generative AI overall—is arguably one of the most transformative technologies since the Internet and the smartphone.

It’s hard to envision what we’ll use to interact with AI in the future besides the smartphone, smartwatch, and earbuds we have today. Jarringly—and perhaps tellingly—despite the video being staged as an informal discussion in a San Francisco coffee shop, Altman chose to describe current usage of ChatGPT in a laptop browser instead of the ChatGPT app on a phone.

The next piece of AI hardware won’t be the now-defunct Humane AI Pin(which also had investment from Sam Altman and a partnership with OpenAI) or the Rabbit r1 (which Marques Brownlee described as “barely reviewable,” after calling the Humane AI Pin “the worst product I’ve ever reviewed”). It’s certainly not the Apple Vision Pro, which, remember, is a “spatial computer.” It may eventually be glasses, even if the Ray-Ban Meta AI Glasses haven’t set the world on fire.

Years of hearing overblown promises have made me inherently skeptical, but Jony Ive and his team have done important work in the past, and OpenAI has the resources and the chutzpah to bring a product to the mainstream market. Whatever it is, it’s slated for late 2026.

Regardless of what OpenAI ultimately ships, this announcement may signal a shift in the balance of power in the tech world. Jony Ive, the guy who played a key role in designing iconic products like the iMac, iPod, iPhone, and MacBook, is now focused on creating the next generation of consumer technology for OpenAI rather than Apple.

Meanwhile, instead of making the iPhone the preferred platform for AI, Apple has struggled to develop and implement a compelling AI vision. At best, Apple Intelligence is currently a scattershot collection of unimpressive features that barely change the user experience; at worst, it’s a promised version of Siri that’s hard to imagine living up to its marketing. Even more embarrassingly, Perplexity has released a version of its voice assistant on iOS that encroaches on Siri’s territory by linking a modern chatbot to public APIs that enable it to create reminders and events, load inline maps, play songs from Apple Music, and more.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised. Apple’s cultural DNA is built around perfecting individual, on-device experiences instead of fostering social interactions, community development, and engagement with the broader Internet. Consider features like iTunes Ping, Game Center, and Apple Music Connect, which struggled due to closed ecosystems, limited opportunities for interaction, and insufficient attention and resources. Apple has also failed to compete in the blogging and publishing space, having discontinued iWeb, limited iCloud sharing to specific data types, and kept Pages focused on print output. And, of course, there’s search, where Apple has consistently depended on Google and other partners to provide information to Spotlight and Siri rather than creating its own index.

Apple’s desire to limit its engagement with the messiness of the Internet isn’t just a historical curiosity—it may represent an existential threat to the company’s future. Recently, in the Google antitrust case, Apple’s senior vice president of services, Eddy Cue, speculated that “you may not need an iPhone 10 years from now” as technology evolves, particularly due to AI. He also noted that AI-powered search features, such as I wrote about in “AI Answer Engines Are Worth Trying” (17 April 2025), have contributed to Safari searches declining for the first time in 22 years.

So Apple executives recognize the threat. The question is, can they generate the youthful perspectives, energy, and enthusiasm needed to keep Apple relevant?