As Apple’s former chief designer, Jony Ive built the iPhone. But in the years since, he has left Apple and seemingly become occupied with the problems he has caused: in a recent interview, he said that there was “not anything that I can be more preoccupied or bothered by” than the problems caused by smartphones.
“I think when you’re innovating, of course, there will be unintended consequences,” Ive said earlier this month. “You hope that the majority will be pleasant surprises. Certain products that I’ve been very, very involved with, I think there were some unintended consequences that were far from pleasant.”
Now we have a hint about how he might fix that. As you might expect from someone who is not only the world’s most famous industrial designer but also obsessed with products, his fix comes from the same place that the problem did: with a new invention that he hopes to sell people.
Specifically, that new product will come from a new company. This week, ChatGPT creator OpenAI said that it is buying io, a product and engineering firm co-founded by Jony Ive; that also gets them access to the designer. Together, they plan to make a whole new kind of product, powered and built for AI, they said.
There has been very little revealed about what the team has been working on, and the secrecy is apparently in part because the company is concerned that it could not arrive until late 2026 and might be copied before then. But since the partnership was formally announced, a report in the Wall Street Journal suggested that the product will be small enough to fit in a pocket, know what context it is being used in and is not glasses.
Altman seems sure that people will like it. It will be a “third core device” on people’s desks alongside a MacBook Pro and an iPhone, he suggested, and he said that it would ship “faster than any company has ever shipped 100 million of something new before”. (ChatGPT already broke that record for users of an online service, gaining 100 million people in two months, though it has since been dethroned by Meta’s Threads.)
But Ive has also been clear that he is working on a “family of devices” and so even a full picture of that product would not necessarily indicate all that Ive and the new company have planned. One of Ive’s central innovations was to broaden the definition of what a computer can be: he may have started with the first iMac, but the iPhone and Apple Watch all served to place devices on our bodies, in new forms. The new products look set to do the same.
There might be clues about what next from Jony Ive’s work before, during and after his time at Apple. Throughout, whether it is phones or Christmas trees, his various work has embodied a few clear principles: a commitment to minimalism, materials, innovation and the practical belief that design is about what things do.
When he introduced the iPhone X, in 2017, for instance, he said that “for more than a decade, our intention has been to create an iPhone that is all display”. “A physical object that disappears into the experience.” Ive was often known for his focus on the visual and tactile parts of design – and his focus has remained that way since, working on clothes and books – but many of his most famous designs from the iMac to the iPhone X are focused on transparency.
The device that comes after the iPhone could do the same. One of the great promises of AI and devices that use it is that the interaction model can change entirely: less scrolling, more conversing. If that happens, then the devices themselves will no longer be defined by a large screen; instead, they could be integrated into glasses, earphones, or other wearable and largely invisible products. If a device is really just a set of sensors, outputs and a connection to a personal AI that knows everything about you, then it can be almost anything.
Ive and Altman will not be the first to try and launch new hardware that leverages the latest developments in artificial intelligence. Last year, Rabbit launched the R1 and Humane launched its Pin; both were savaged by reviewers, who said that they were poorly designed and unnecessary. Since then, the market has been much quieter.
Ive is aware. In an interview with Bloomberg after the deal was announced, Ive said both were “very poor products”, and that there has been “an absence of new ways of thinking expressed in products”.
Other companies have looked to leverage their existing wearables into AI products. The marketing for Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses, for instance – which include a microphone, a camera and speakers that project straight into the ear – has become increasingly focused on their use for artificial intelligence. Ads show how they can be used to look at an animal, or painting, or clothing, and have AI analyse and understand it, for instance
At Ive’s old employer, the bet at least in the near term is that the iPhone of the future is still the iPhone – just with more integration of AI. The introduction of what the company calls Apple Intelligence – branding for a suite of features that use artificial intelligence – has been rocky, with delays and other problems, but the company remains of the belief that the technology can be integrated with the iPhone, rather than being used to replace it.
But even Apple executives have acknowledged that new technology could make the iPhone obsolete. ““You may not need an iPhone 10 years from now as crazy as it sounds,”, services boss Eddy Cue told a recent court hearing, pointing out that “technology shifts” can bring new opportunities for competition. (The hearing was about Google’s dominance in search, something that Apple has a hand in because of a multiple billion dollar deal to make it the default on the iPhone, and so his comments should be viewed in that context.)
Even if Apple remains committed to the iPhone, it too has been at work on products that use AI in new ways – whether to complement or compete with it remains to be seen. Apple has been at work on new kinds of robotics, for instance, a push that has been unusually well documented for such a secretive company.
Like every attempt to build the iPhone of the future, those robots have been met with something between curiosity and confusion. But people laughed at the iPhone when it arrived, too; Ive was right then, and he might be again.
