From iPhone to AI: Why Jony Ive’s OpenAI Deal Signals a Power Shift

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Originally published at: From iPhone to AI: Why Jony Ive’s OpenAI Deal Signals a Power Shift - TidBITS

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?

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Endorse all these comments however the announcement reminds me of one of the schemes launched at the time of The South Sea Company in 1720. The prospectus stated that the scheme was “for carrying on an undertaking of great advantage which shall in due time be revealed”. I wonder if Mr. Altman would care to buy this bridge to Brooklyn I happen to have for sale…

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It was glossy and over-luvvied up for sure. At some point the tech bros have to realise how all that puffery is privileged mutual self promotion, very off putting. But still…. A lot of potential, an impressive gathering of talent, a boatload of money, and a perspective on what is next. But… There’s definitely no there there yet. Late 26? Nope.

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Ha ha! The more things change, the more they stay the same. Here’s the present day version:

Ive and Altman’s “announcement” reminds me of when Dean Kamen said he was working on a “world changing” product, the media and Internet went wild with speculation with even Steve Jobs chiming in…then all we got was the Segway scooter. Haven’t seen many of those around lately!

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“Jony Ive and his team” (and his outsized ego) made a mess of the Mac in his later years with the company in my opinion. He “fixed” a user interface that wasn’t broken, focused on “thin” rather than functional, and (I believe) was the “genius” behind the egregious “butterfly” keyboard and the ill fated touch strip among other “improvements”. He was always changing the icons around for reasons I could never understand. The fact that Altman paid $6.5 B to acquire this Prima Donna will go down as “Altman’s Folly”. He may have done nice work when Jobs was around to counterbalance him but he went off the rails when Jobs left.

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I have no doubt Apple needs to get really serious if they want to retain relevance. Lack of software quality, lack of innovation, the cluster that is Siri, the AI fraud, etc. none of that bears well.

That said, these two self-infatuated bozos talked about shipping “100M units literally on day one”. (Note to self: people who don’t know how to use the word literally are figuratively turkeys) This for a device for which they can’t even mention dimensions or show an enclosure. The age old oversell and underdeliver. How many more times is the rest of the world going to fall for this kind of self aggrandizing tech bro nonsense? A decade after Lizzy Holmes, you’d think we’d have smartened up a little. Biz reality these days sometimes feels like an episode of Silicon Valley or Succession.

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Altman chose to illustrate using ChatGPT on a laptop instead of a phone like a normal person.

Okay, I’ll put my ignorance on display. Why does a “normal person” (if such exist) use ChatGPT on a phone?

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There’s a ChatGPT app for the iPhone that works extremely well in voice mode, where you talk to it and it replies out loud. It’s laughable that someone like Sam Altman in a San Francisco coffee shop would pull out their laptop and open a browser to load the ChatGPT website, rather than launching the ChatGPT app on an iPhone. It would be like using Google Maps on a laptop instead of a phone.

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I would say that this depends entirely on what you plan on doing.

If I’m going to be navigating in the car, you bet I want to use my phone. But if I want to preview a route, research alternate routes or search for nearby locations to shop/eat at, then I want to do it with a large screen and a keyboard, which means a laptop or desktop.

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Altman chose to illustrate using ChatGPT on a laptop instead of a phone like a normal person.

Adam, why it may be not normal to use a laptop, which is way more convenient to perform what Altman described as a query to AI and see results of it? ;) Just curious.

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Yeah Altman chose to cite having to take a laptop out of a bag to query ChatGPT as he was touting the convenience of whatever it is they propose as better.

He didn’t want to mention the phone as it would immediately make their top secret so-called ground-breaking device seem pointless - which it most likely is.

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Sure, but the context here was two people chatting in a coffee shop. For something as simple as talking to a chatbot or looking something up on Google Maps, the phone is far more lightweight.

I’m really not sure how to parse your question, but as I said above, while sitting in a coffee shop and talking with someone, pulling out a laptop is overkill for how he described using ChatGPT.

Indeed—that’s why it was jarring. I’ve already seen speculation that they didn’t show a phone because they’re making a phone, but there’s also reporting from them denying that they’re making a phone. So who knows?

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I can’t speak to this situation, but I’ve had bad luck with voice interfaces. If I’m trying to demonstrate something, I don’t want to risk the software getting the wrong words and submitting nonsense to the software. I’d rather type my requests, so I know exactly what I’m sending it.

I also tend to be able to type faster than I can speak the same words.

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I may be wrong, but, to me, he was describing rather general situation of querying ChatGPT, not just for someone sitting in a coffee shop like himself in that very moment. But, even in that situation, laptop might have been preferable for many, for a bunch of reasons. So, normality is not a proper characteristic, I believe.
I know, you are a very thorough person at picking words, but so am I ;)

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And I chose that phrasing specifically. :slight_smile: Here’s the quote with some editing from Notes transcription, which comes while he’s miming doing these things while sitting at a bar counter in a coffee shop:

We have, like, magic intelligence in the cloud.

If I wanted to ask ChatGPT something right now, about something we had talked about earlier, think about what would happen.

I would, like, reach out, I would get on my laptop, I’d open it up, I’d launch a web browser, I’d start typing, and I’d have to, like, explain that thing.

I would hit enter, and I would wait, and I would get a response.

And that is at the limit of what the current tool of a laptop can do , but I think this technology deserves something much better.

It’s a classic strawman.

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Victoria Song has a good article speculating about the device at The Verge.

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Great writing Adam:

Despite all the self-congratulatory Bay Area tech bro exaggeration…

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That’s what I think of as well. Great inventors don’t always hit the ball out of the park. As others have observed, Jony Ive focused too much on form and hamstrung function in his later years at Apple, and his new company has yet to deliver any hardware.

Sam Altman is a man who talks a lot and has some interesting ideas, but when I reviewed Adam Becker’s new book “More Everything Forever” in New Scientist, I found Altman was all over the place, his opinions changing whenever he opened his mouth. By the way, I highly recommend Becker’s book because he exposes how many billionaires have egos the size of a planet and are seriously lacking in real-world judgement.

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And Jason Snell is skeptical as well:

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As someone who is extremely put off by the astronomically large egos of the two principals, I think there is no reason to think that simply putting those two organizations together will yield a device that is significantly better than the two recently failed AI wearables. Whatever it is, the product is a tiny electronic device with extremely ambitious pretensions. Do either of these organizations have any experience with building tiny but sophisticated electronic devices?

I second the above recommendation of Snell’s piece. He said it all much better than I did.

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