The Anti iPhone
Yesterday, upon reading all the coverage about OpenAI buying io – which I'm going to continue to style as 'IO' for my own typing sanity – and especially watching the um, unique, video that Jony Ive and Sam Altman released to both formally announce IO and to talk a bit about what they're working on, it became pretty clear, pretty quickly that despite all the rumors to the contrary, the device wouldn't be a wearable. As I wrote:
Ive himself gave an interview just a couple weeks ago, hinting at what such a collaboration could be working towards – notably, a potential anecdote to smartphone addiction that Ive feels some level of remorse for having helped to usher into existence via his iPhone designs.
Beyond that, all we get are whispers of "headphones" and "cameras" from WSJ sources. NYT talks vaguely about "ambient computing". What might this be? It's almost impossible to say, but I'm not sure it's exactly wearable, which is interesting. One thing it's not: a pair of smart glasses.
The key tell was the part of the video where Altman starts talking about how we're using the current "legacy" products, to use Ive's wording, to access future technology in the form of AI. It starts around 3:50 in:
"We have like magic intelligence in the cloud. If I wanted to ask ChatGPT something right now about something we talked about earlier, think about what would happen. I would like reach down, I would get out my laptop, I would open it up, I'd launch a web browser, I'd start typing and I'd have to like explain that thing and I'd 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."
Now, all of that could imply a wearable of some sort. But the key thing Altman seems focused on there is input, not necessarily the need to use it on-the-go. To me, this implies voice is the key of this device. Perhaps I'm biasing myself as I've been writing about this notion for years and years at this point. While the initial wave of devices leveraging Siri and Alexa got us closer to this type of computing, the truth is that the underlying tech wasn't good enough. Not nearly. We got sort of tricked because the voice recognition had finally gotten to the point where it worked well most of the time. But that actually wasn't the hard part, as it turns out. The hard part was the AI. OpenAI built the hard part first.
As I wrote almost exactly a year ago, right after the launch of GPT-4o and alongside it, the new voice mode for ChatGPT:
There were several points during OpenAI's demonstration of their new 'GPT-4o' model yesterday where I had to laugh. Not necessarily a "that's funny" laugh but more a "that's amazing" laugh. A profound laugh. A laugh to myself. A "this is it" laugh.
I've been on the voice train for a while. 13 years ago, I broke the news that Apple would be integrating Siri directly into the iPhone OS, which it did that fall. And it has been a part of iOS ever since. But while Siri may have been first, it was Amazon a few years later that was able to scale vocal computing to new heights, thanks to their Alexa cheap device everywhere strategy. Google then entered the fray with their own voice assistant and devices. Microsoft too. Samsung. And so on. But while there was intense consumer curiosity in such devices and functionality, once the novelty boiled off, we were left with a rather simplistic system for playing music, asking about the weather, setting timers, and maybe a game or two.
The gadgets have been here, but the technology powering them was not ready. With yesterday's OpenAI announcement, it finally feels ready.
Amazon – and one day, Apple – clearly feel like they can just plug the new AI into those initial wave of devices. It hasn't proven easy to do and I'm skeptical of the long-term prospects there. This new partnership clearly believes that a new type of product is needed for the technology to truly sing.1
If you step back to think about it, it is sort of ridiculous that we're using laptops to mainly interact with ChatGPT. It makes sense for coding, of course. But for most everything else? Obviously, a smartphone makes far more sense – and that will be the inertia that OpenAI/IO will have to battle here – but it too is overkill.
And the elements that lead that device to be good for basically everything are some of the same things that Ive now clearly regrets having had a literal hand in creating. Notably, social media in his case, but it goes beyond that too. It's a device which has distracted us all too much for too long. And the main culprit is a villain as old as time – well, as old as television: the screen.
Look, there are obviously counterarguments to all of this. And it does feel a bit Nanny State to tell people they shouldn't be doing what they clearly want to be doing. But I'm trying to paint a picture of where I think Ive and Altman are coming from. And more importantly, where I think they're going.
The problem with a full-on wearable in this regard is that everyone focuses far too much on the whole wearable part. That is, the exterior of the device and how it will work on your body. And then: how can I get the technology to work on that? But I suspect that OpenAI/IO are focused on the opposite: what's the best device to use this technology? Why does it have to be wearable?
To be clear, I suspect that whatever the device is, it will look fantastic – this is an Ive/LoveFrom production, after all – but that's mainly because beautiful products bring a sense of delight to users and can spur usage. I suspect the key to the design here will be yes: how it works. And again, I suspect that will be largely based around voice, and perhaps augmented by a camera.
Back to what I wrote a year ago:
To be clear, I'm not saying that voice has to be the only way you interact with a computer. It may not even be the primary way much of the time – it really depends on what you're doing. But that's also the key: voice, truly reliable voice, needs to be a part of the computing interaction paradigm. It's going to be a key part of the concert of computing, across many services and many devices in many places.
For what's next, it also means visuals, something else OpenAI dropped into the announcement yesterday – putting the 'o', "omni", in GPT-4o – which is undoubtedly worthy of its own deep dive. I mean, with the new Mac app, it can see your screen. And I suspect using a phone's camera will be a key part of whatever Apple is going to announce AI-wise with the iPhone as well. Perhaps with OpenAI in tow...
Apple did launch what I suspected – sort of – in the form of 'Visual Intelligence'. And yes, they worked with OpenAI on it – as well as Google! But it's so buried in all the other bungling of Apple Intelligence, that it has been completely overshadowed. And others are doing far more interesting things now, as Google showcased this week at I/O – the conference, not the company, sigh. This will be one of the next major opportunities in further bringing the real world into the AI fold. Apple and Google have billion-plus device head starts, but again, their devices boil the ocean. Is there space for a purpose-built one?
Anyway, fast-forward to today, thanks to some reporting from Berber Jin of The Wall Street Journal, we can now be even more certain that this new device is not a wearable:
Altman and Ive offered a few hints at the secret project they have been working on. 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.
The Journal earlier reported that the device won’t be a phone, and that Ive and Altman’s intent is to help wean users from screens. Altman said that the device isn’t a pair of glasses, and that Ive had been skeptical about building something to wear on the body.
You'll recall that Ive's last real dive into new product design at Apple was the Apple Watch.2 Their first true wearable, where they, yes, perhaps focused too much on the wearable part to start and less on what it should actually do.
Anyway, the reporting here makes the IO device sound a bit like a newfangled tape recorder of sorts. Okay, I'm dating myself – a voice recorder. You know, the thing some journalists use to record subjects for interviews. Well, when they're not using their phones for that purpose, as they undoubtedly are 99% of the time these days. But it sounds sort of like that only with, I suspect, some sort of camera. I doubt that's about recording as much as it's about the ability to have ChatGPT "look" at something and tell you about it. But these are just guesses.
If I'm at all right, this will undoubtedly lead to an immediate "nope" from many people. But this is also one of those "skating to where the puck is going" things. Everyone was quick to "nope" when the Google Glassholes first emerged in the wild, and perhaps rightfully so! But now we have the Meta Ray-Ban glasses which are not only accepted, but feted! No, not fully – but you can see an arc here.
Time transforms everything. Norms change.
Do I think the world is ready for a newfangled AI companion device today? Broadly, no. But OpenAI/IO also aren't shipping today. At best, it sounds like they'll be shipping at the end of next year. At that point, a few more AI hardware products will have launched, both from startups and from companies like Google. Apple will probably still be about a year away from launching their Meta Ray-Ban competitors – snicker – but pump will be more primed, is my point.
For some reason here, my mind goes to the iPod Shuffle. It was one of my favorite products of all time – and I know I'm not alone there. It was just so simple and elegant. It did one thing and did it well. I'm imagining that type of hardware, undoubtedly with a more modern aesthetic, but for ChatGPT. And I mean, if it has a lanyard, does that make it a "wearable"? Maybe! Or maybe it will be more like the iPod nano and you'll prefer to put it in that jeans pocket which Steve Jobs famously figured out how to use all those years ago...3
All of this, of course, is much easier said than shipped. Apple, for all their faults these days (especially when it comes to AI), remains the undisputed champ of being able to manufacture and launch devices at scale. Jin apparently pulled a direct quote from something Altman told employees:
For months, Ive’s team has been speaking with vendors who will be able to ship the device at scale. “We’re not going to ship 100 million devices literally on day one,” Altman said, predicting that OpenAI would ship that large quantity of high-quality devices “faster than any company has ever shipped 100 million of something new before.” Altman said the goal is to release a device by late next year.
Is that a realistic goal or more like an Elon Musk aspirational goal? Hard to say. But certainly Ive and his team will have at least the right connections to talk to in order to make it happen. As I wrote in a footnote yesterday:
One thing that OpenAI won't have – even with the IO team on board – is a massive logistics operation in Asia, like, say, Apple. Or the partners helping Meta and Google in their wearable AI tech. The IO team should have all the right contacts, but it takes time, and money, to build up such things. At least OpenAI has the money! Or maybe they aim to build in the US? That would be looked upon very favorably by you-know-who...
Back to Jin:
Rolling out new devices, especially ones that will compete with deep-pocketed, multitrillion-dollar companies like Apple or Google, has long been among the most difficult of challenges in the tech industry. Humane, a startup made up of former Apple executives that Altman invested in, sold an “Ai Pin” that failed to catch on with consumers.
I'm not sure why this is always downplayed/skipped over: Altman wasn't just an investor in Humane, he was the largest investor. Still, as we all are well aware, sometimes the best way to learn is to make mistakes. And Humane seemingly made all of them. They launched a wearable with a holographic projector just as the world was entering the Age of AI. Maybe they stumbled so IO could run.
While Apple and Google have struggled to keep pace with AI innovations, many investors see the two companies—whose software runs nearly all the world’s smartphones—as the primary means through which billions of people will access AI tools and chatbots. Building a device is the only way OpenAI and other artificial-intelligence companies will be able to interact with consumers directly.
Yeah, as Meta knows all too well, this is the real challenge that OpenAI/IO faces here. Again, it's inertia. The iPhone and Android phones are at such a scale that it will be challenging to get people to buy "yet another device". In a way, it's the old "the best camera is the one you have on you" issue that ultimately killed the point-and-shoot camera market – but in reverse. The best AI device may be the one you already have on you, because you already have it on you.
Of course, the aforementioned Alexa was able to overcome this. Part of that was novelty, part of it was Amazon's strategy to flood the market – and, importantly, their little e-commerce site – with cheap Echo devices, making them ubiquitous. And OpenAI may have their own clever play here:
“We both got excited about the idea that, if you subscribed to ChatGPT, we should just mail you new computers, and you should use those,” Altman said.
They may not be able to get people to buy "yet another device", but they may be able to get them in people's homes if they simply ship them out for free, if you're a ChatGPT subscriber... Now that would be a unique model for Ive and his team...
Of course, none of that answers how such a device will connect to the cloud which will clearly be required here. A WiFi device seemingly doesn't make sense since it would be a huge pain to set up over and over again if you did take it with you (perhaps especially without a screen!). Perhaps it tethers to your phone, but there will be trade-offs there. Or maybe it comes with its own connection – the old, original Amazon Kindle approach. With the right partners, this could work, though again, whose paying for that bandwidth?
This may seem like a detail but it will be of vital importance if the goal is truly to make a device that "inevitable" as Ive so often likes to say.
In the video, they're quick to note that it won't replace the smartphone any time soon, but clearly the intent here is to get people to use them less often. To do that, they will have to fill the moments in time that a smartphone fills for billions right now. Waiting in line. A lull in a conversation. The desire to look something up, only to get distracted down a rabbit hole of notifications.
There's obviously a desire for something here, even if people don't fully recognize it yet. And there's clearly a latent demand for something new to come along. Everyone feels that – including Ive and Altman. But that alone is not enough. Our desk drawers are littered with gadgets that were hot for a split second and then were not cool. Smart Glasses have the buzz right now, but they did too when Snapchat first did them, after Google Glass failed to do them. All these things fade without real utility.
The key is to build something that lasts. A device that brings something new to the table. It can't just be the anti-iPhone, that's mainly a marketing ploy. A good headline. It will be about what it does, something new it brings to the table alongside that phone and laptop.
Crossing that chasm was the magic Steve Jobs was able to pull off time and time again. Can Ive without Jobs? Can Ive with Altman?
One more thing: the very name 'io' is an interesting choice. Is the lowercase 'i' meant to evoke other Apple products that Ive and team created at Apple? Notably, of course, the iPhone? Meanwhile, 'OpenAI' starts with an 'o' and ends with an 'i'. And the company is seemingly all about the 'o'. Beyond the company name, might it point to a focus on 'omni' devices coming from the team that made so many 'i' devices?
Am I reading way too much into this? (Don't answer that.)
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
1 And it sounds like products, plural, is the goal here. Which suggests that while perhaps not the first device, a wearable of some sort very well could be in the cards eventually...
2 Obviously he worked on the ultimately defunct Apple Car project. And the Vision Pro to some extent too -- though his displeasure with where the device ended up is also well noted.
3 No screen though here, of course!