Former Apple Design Chief Jony Ive Teams Up with OpenAI for the Next Big Thing
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Legendary Apple designer Jony Ive has been a busy guy since he left the building in 2019 to pursue other adventures. After teaming up with fellow designer and close friend Marc Newson to form his own design studio, LoveFrom, he expanded to offer his design prowess to many other high-end brands such as Ferrari.
However, it turns out Ive secretly had at least one other iron in the fire. In 2024, he expanded beyond core design consulting when he quietly co-founded an AI startup with Scott Cannon, Evans Hankey, and Tang Tan. Notably, Hankey was one of Ive’s successors at Apple until she left the company in 2023 in an exodus of its top designers. Tang Tan led iPhone and Apple Watch product design until 2024, while Cannon had left Apple years earlier to create the Mailbox app, which was eventually acquired by Dropbox.
Ive’s AI initiative was a well-kept secret until this week when OpenAI announced that “Sam & Jony” were getting together to introduce io, where “Sam” is OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. The company’s post revealed that the two teams have been quietly collaborating for about two years, and now they’re preparing to meld Ive’s design expertise with OpenAI’s artificial intelligence technologies to produce, well, something.
What that “something” is remains a mystery, as the company is being quite mysterious about it. Bloomberg got into the nitty-gritty of the deal, which is technically an acquisition of Ive’s AI device startup “in a nearly $6.5 billion all-stock deal.”
“I have a growing sense that everything I’ve learned over the last 30 years has led me to this place and to this moment,” Ive told Bloomberg in a joint interview with Sam Altman. “It’s a relationship and a way of working together that I think is going to yield products and products and products.”
While Ive has also dabbled in software design — he gets the credit (or blame, depending on your perspective) for the “flat” look we got in iOS 7, which has inspired modern iPhone and iPad software design ever since. That’s expected to change when iOS 19 appears next month, but it will still mean the Ive-inspired design has graced iPhone screens for over a decade.
Still, Ive’s most significant contributions to Apple have been on the hardware side, from the original iPod and iPhone to the modern MacBook and Apple Watch designs. To be fair, not all of Ive’s ideas have been home runs. Some were way ahead of the technology, such as the pitch for a steering wheel-less Apple Car in 2014, and some just put form way too far ahead of function, such as Ive’s desire for thinness that led to the butterfly keyboard fiasco. Ive also reportedly wanted to reduce Apple’s MacBook lineup to one laptop that would do everything.
Jony Ive worked alongside Steve Jobs for years and was counted among the late CEO and co-founder’s closest confidants. However, many insiders have said that it was this dynamic duo that led to Apple’s extraordinary designs, as Ive’s visionary whimsy needed to be mixed with Jobs’ more practical views. “Steve Jobs was his editor,” as veteran tech journalist Walt Mossberg said in a 2024 interview, “Jobs would pull him away from his crazier instincts.”
In this new OpenAI partnership, Ive may have found his new “Steve” in the form of Sam Altman. Jobs once described Ive as his “spiritual partner,” and Altman hopes that he and Ive can have a similar relationship.
OpenAI is going to create a product at a level of quality that “has never happened before in consumer hardware,” Altman said. “AI is such a big leap forward in terms of what people can do that it needs a new kind of computing form factor to get the maximum potential out of it,” he said.
Mark Gurman and Shirin Ghaffary, Bloomberg
For OpenAI, a company that’s been focused exclusively on software — and mainly on the back end — the acquisition will give them access to a team of hardware engineers and manufacturing experts to design and build what’s expected to become a family of devices, the first of which could debut as soon as next year.
Whatever they’re working on, it will be something more than the ill-fated Humane pin or Rabbit R1 personal assistant. “Those were very poor products,” Ive said in the Bloomberg interview. “There has been an absence of new ways of thinking expressed in products.”
Nevertheless, whatever it is, it won’t be a competitor to the iPhone. What Ive and Altman envision is a new way for people to connect with AI that will be to the smartphone what that mobile device was to the laptop. “In the same way that the smartphone didn’t make the laptop go away, I don’t think our first thing is going to make the smartphone go away,” Altman told Bloomberg. “It is a totally new kind of thing.”
That suggests something beyond any of the form factors we’ve yet seen, which has definitely gotten our curiosity piqued. Altman has specifically said it’s not a pair of smart glasses, and it would be underwhelming to see them do something like a pin, smartwatch, smartphone, or headphones. While most of those aren’t revolutionary AI products, the form factors have been done to death, and it’s hard to imagine a man with Ive’s design vision doing something so pedestrian.
According to The Wall Street Journal, whatever they have in mind will be a “third core device” that will act as a companion to a MacBook and an iPhone.
The product will be capable of being fully aware of a user’s surroundings and life, will be unobtrusive, able to rest in one’s pocket or on one’s desk, and will be a third core device a person would put on a desk after a MacBook Pro and an iPhone.
Berber Jin, The Wallet Street Journal
While we don’t know exactly what the device will be, Altman and Ive have given enough clues to tell us what it won’t be. They want to “help wean users from screens,” and Ive has “been skeptical about building something to wear on the body.” That rules out the most common ideas, and when you put it all together, they’re setting a pretty high bar for something that will be revolutionary. However, don’t expect to hear much more until it’s ready for release, as they plan to cloak it in an Apple-grade level of security to prevent competitors from copying the product before it’s ready.
Still, the duo is highly ambitious that this will be a “must-have” product. “We’re not going to ship 100 million devices literally on day one,” Altman said, but he believes they will do it “faster than any company has ever shipped 100 million of something new before.”
