Steve Jobs would have been proud of Jony Ive’s move: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman
In a landmark acquisition that could shape the next decade of consumer technology, OpenAI has acquired ‘io’, the AI hardware startup founded by legendary Apple designer Sir Jony Ive, in a deal reportedly worth $6.5 billion. The move gives OpenAI not only a foothold in hardware but also access to one of the most visionary design minds of the modern era. According to Bloomberg, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman believes Apple’s late co-founder Steve Jobs would have been “damn proud” of Ive’s latest venture, a sentiment that feels less like hyperbole and more like prophecy if this partnership lives up to its potential.
Jobs and Ive’s partnership has been documented and analysed extensively over the years, and there’s little need to revisit it here. What’s more compelling is how Ive’s famously conceptual, and often deeply abstract, approach to design could influence this new era of AI hardware.
If you’ve read Leander Kahney’s Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products, you’ll know the Jony Ive of today is very much the same person who once coated the back of film with gouache to perfect the transparency of a sketch. For him, technology has always been about more than function, it’s about meaning and emotional resonance.
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That passion for thoughtful design and human connection hasn’t faded. In fact, it may have only grown deeper. Interviews over the years reveal how often Ive returns to one word: intention. His musings on how we relate to technology, and how it should make us feel, suggest a level of thinking that’s becoming increasingly rare in an industry chasing speed over soul.
A New Category in the Making?
When reports first surfaced that Ive and Altman were working on “a new hardware for the age of AI,” many seasoned tech watchers had a mixed reaction, equal parts excitement and cautious scepticism.
Here’s the issue: the AI hardware market today is caught in an awkward in-between. On one side, you have rushed “AI phone killers” that amount to little more than plastic shells running ChatGPT. On the other, you have AI software that lives trapped inside the iPhone ecosystem, unable to fully express what it could do if it had native hardware control.
This leaves a massive gap, an opportunity, for something new. A device that’s designed, from the ground up, to be intelligent. Not smart in the smartphone sense, but perceptive, ambient, and useful in the way a true assistant might be. The kind of thing only someone like Jony Ive could dream up, and only someone like Sam Altman could bankroll without expecting a return for years.
The Ive Factor
There’s little doubt Ive has been quietly contemplating this challenge in his various design studios, considering not just how an AI device would look, but what it should do. And now he has what most designers can only dream of: essentially unlimited funding, time, and access to one of the most powerful AI companies on the planet.
If this collaboration yields what it promises, a thoughtfully designed, genuinely useful AI companion, it won’t just be a new product category. It might be the first piece of hardware since the iPhone to feel like a meaningful step forward. And if that’s the case, then yes, Jobs probably would be proud.
