OpenAI is acquiring Jony Ive’s startup, io Products, for $6.5 billion, appointing the former Apple iPhone design chief as creative head to develop generative AI-focused ChatGPT devices. LoveFrom, Ive’s design firm post-Apple, has collaborated with OpenAI for two years on AI devices, navigating challenges like high computing demands that have tripped up startups like Humane’s AI Pin.
Reuters:
With Ive leading design, OpenAI aims to pair the technology behind its popular ChatGPT chatbot with the product design expertise that made devices such as the iPhone bestsellers.
“The products that we’re using to deliver and connect us to unimaginable technology. They’re decades old, yeah, and so it’s just common sense to at least think surely there’s something beyond these legacy products we have,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Ive said in a video posted on OpenAI’s blog.
Altman said they had a prototype of a device without giving further details, but called it “the coolest piece of technology the world will have ever seen.”
Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment. It’s shares fell more than 2% on the news.
The iPhone maker has been slow to roll out Apple Intelligence, a set of features with access to ChatGPT, with several advanced AI tools available on competing Android smartphones.
“OpenAI is interested in owning the next hardware platform so they don’t have to sell their products through Apple iOS or Google’s Android,” D.A. Davidson analyst Gil Luria said. “This is the same ambition Meta has with the Quest goggles and Meta Ray Bans.”
MacDailyNews Take: Can very late Apple, with an uninspiring, boring, dithering CEO who, focused on the wrong things, completely missed the GenAI revolution, deploy its huge cash mountain in a desperate effort to catch up, or will it be left behind? If Apple were still leading, Jony Ive wouldn’t have lost interest (as have far too many) and would still be innovating there.
This is an existential moment for Apple and the company clearly has the wrong CEO for the job.
Apple needed new blood years ago, but the old blood simply won’t let go. – MacDailyNews, January 22, 2025
You can keep blaming Cooks’ bad hires, but things won’t meaningfully change until Apple corrects the source of its issues. Where does the buck really stop at Apple Inc.? … All of the deck chairs are being rearranged except for the one that really matters. – MacDailyNews, May 19, 2025
Doing a deal with Elon Musk – to use Grok (among, if not the very best GenAI today) and/or access some portion of X.com data – would be smart, but we don’t see Cook being able to bring himself to do it due to personal politics (which is yet another way Cook handicaps the company by limiting its appeal to the widest possible audience; a dereliction of his fiduciary duty to shareholders). – MacDailyNews, May 19, 2025
You know, some people get upset when we point out that Tim Cook is a boring, reactive caretaker who’s not really the best person to be running Apple today or for at least the past several years.
Operations manager Cook should have been a 3-5 year stopgap after Steve Jobs’ untimely passing, running the iteration playbook, providing continuity for the company while it found a real CEO. Instead, he hung on — and keeps hanging on — well past his sell-by date.
Sigh.
You can be upset with us for having the temerity to call it like we see it, but the fact remains that Apple would be doing significantly better today with a visionary who’d have seen AI on the horizon, who’d have recognized the intrinsic importance of Siri and therefore invested in it instead of criminally neglecting it, and who wouldn’t have squandered the company’s gigantic leads in things like personal assistants and podcasting. – MacDailyNews, August 22, 2024
Every Apple (AAPL) shareholder should of course enjoy every new all-time high, but also never forget that with a visionary CEO instead of a myopic, iterative, virtue-signaling caretaker who’s currently on tour peddling AI vaporware* because he completely missed it by wasting… pic.twitter.com/ceecUAbJUA
— MacDailyNews (@MacDailyNews) December 6, 2024
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In fairness to Tim Cook, historically, there is only one person that can lead Apple,
and he is dead.
Apple seems to be sliding slowly into irrelevance.
The only thing they do well is computers in the traditional sense and thats about to become yesterday’s tech.
How could he believe that those glasses would be accepted by anybody, heavy, bulky, pointless, expensive.
If i was apple i would hire mdn.
Jobs, like everyone else, was unique, but there certainly are innovators in this world, people with charisma, people with drive. That is the type Apple needs.
What would Walt do?
I suspect that if it doesn’t take pictures, make phone calls, play music, play movies, provide directions, play games, have apps that connect to all of your electronic stuff and have a nice display screen without hallucinating it probably won’t be the coolest thing.
Apple needs to hire Jony back and if that means he replacing Tim, so be it.
Where are the futurists, or the ‘crazy ones’ in Cupertino? Have they all been stomped out by the boring, silver haired C-suite dinosaurs?
Apple is becoming the premier case example of what happens to an incumbent that is incapable of seeing its own demise as beautifully explained in The Innovators Dilemma.
Clay Christenson has yet to write the final chaper to that great book.
Yes, recommended reading: The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton M. Christensen
An Apple product with the same basic design from 18 years ago shows two things. The strength of that design, (Nice going Mr. Ive) and the utter lack of innovation at Apple. The software is better, the basic design has minor changes, but it is the same candy bar with a software keyboard.
There is no better form factor for the ultimate personal computing device than the modern smartphone invented by Apple in the form of the iPhone. Everything we’ve seen from all of the AI hype has been mediocre at best for most people’s use cases and certainly nothing remotely close to ‘replacing your smartphone’. No one wants to keep constantly talking and typing to some Orwellian ‘AI assistant’. The beauty of the iPhone is that your brain knows exactly what you want and your fingers do the rest. Every attempt to insert something new in between your brain and your fingers is a way to benefit some corporation’s interests, not yours.
Jony Ive’s involvement brings a whole new level of excitement to the ChatGPT prototype. When visionary design meets cutting-edge AI, the result could truly be the most impressive piece of technology we’ve ever seen. Looking forward to what this collaboration will bring!