Why the Jony Ive, OpenAI gadget sounds like a loser

Cryptic leaks don't tell us what the OpenAI hardware will be, only what it will not be. And what it will not be is precisely what it should be.

May 22, 2025

OpenAI is getting into the hardware racket.

They're doing this by acquiring io, a hardware startup co-founded by former Apple design chief Jony Ive, for $6.5 billion in OpenAI stock.

(Ive and his design firm, LoveFrom, will stay independent but take on a significant creative and design role within OpenAI. io's team of about 55 engineers, designers, and researchers will join OpenAI and form a new hardware division.)

We've learned through leaks and rumors that the hardware won’t be a pair of smart glasses or a smartwatch. It's not a wearable at all. And it's not a phone.

So what is it?

OpenAI chief Sam Altman and Ive (who made an awkward video and posted this wedding announcement) are thinking biggish: 100 million AI-powered devices, they say. In what time frame, they didn't say. (They hope to ship by the end of next year.)

Altman and Ive want to create a "family" of hardware products designed to sit on your desk. When you get up to go somewhere, it will either go in your pocket or hang around your neck. It won't be a "screen experience," they say.

Given what we know, the product already sounds like a loser. There are three reasons why I say that.

They won't have a problem to solve. AI chatbots will be commoditized and ubiquitous by the time this ships. Everyone will have AI on their phones, in their glasses, on their smartwatches, and on their computers. To have a reason to exist, a "third device" (beyond laptop and phone) would have to do something existing devices don't do in terms of interface or sensors. And if they do invent a magic sensor for their "third device," everyone else will copy it into the existing form factors.
You can't beat glasses for AI. In the US, two-thirds of adults already wear glasses. It's an accepted wearable form factor. Glasses put screens directly in front of your eyes and speakers right next to your ears and point the camera and other sensors directly at whatever you're looking at. You can use multi-modal, multi-media AI all day hands-free. For multi-modal AI, you can't beat glasses.
Pockets are maxed out. We already carry earbuds, keys, wallets, phones, and other objects in our pockets. If they think the public has more room in our pants for another bulky gadget, they are mistaken.

The winning strategy for OpenAI would have been to partner with Ive on the creation of AI glasses that work with a smartwatch as an AI-based phone replacement — and then ban the use of OpenAI on competitors' glasses. In that way, they could have created a compelling project that was attractive to existing OpenAI brand loyalists.

Instead of creating a "third device," AI companies should work on eliminating the "second device."

No matter how tortured a genius Ive is, you can't design your way out of the reality that a device in one's pocket cannot be used without removing it from that pocket unless there's a wearable involved. And nobody wants to hang something around their neck.

The promise of AI is that we can use computers without using them. The intelligence, information, and communication are just "there." And that requires wearables like glasses.

Ive is a genius, though. Ive convinced Altman to divert billions of dollars from investors in his direction, all for the promise of a device that does not and probably should not exist.