Jony Ive Teams Up with OpenAI to Launch io, First AI Hardware Product Revealed

Apple's legendary designer Jony Ive has finally unveiled the most important project since his departure from Apple — a new company called io, which has announced a merger with OpenAI. The design visionary behind epoch-defining products like the iPhone and MacBook Pro is now joining forces with Sam Altman to redefine how humans interact with AI.

From a Conversation to the Birth of io

The origin story is rather dramatic. Jony Ive's son Charlie was the first in the family to use ChatGPT, and he told his father: "You have to meet Sam." That introduction brought together two of the tech world's most prominent figures.

Two years ago, Jony Ive and Sam Altman began discussing the future of AI and the possibilities for new computing devices. At the time, Sam was leading OpenAI, while Jony was running a design firm called LoveFrom — which Sam described as "probably the densest collection of talent I've ever heard of, maybe in the history of the world."

LoveFrom is no ordinary design studio. Jony Ive spent nearly 30 years at Apple, serving as Chief Design Officer and leading the creation of the iMac G3, iPod, iPhone, iPad, MacBook Air, and a series of other industry-transforming products before leaving Apple in 2019 to establish this independent design company. LoveFrom is a highly elite creative collective whose members include several top designers from Apple's industrial design team. Its early clients included brands like Hermès and Airbnb, yet it maintained a mysterious, low-profile operating style. It was precisely this pursuit of design excellence that led Sam Altman to view it as the ideal partner.

The two quickly realized they needed an entirely new third-party company to carry this vision forward. A year ago, Jony co-founded io with Scott Cannon, Evans Hankey, and Tang Tan. The team brings together top experts spanning hardware engineering, software engineering, physics, research, and product manufacturing. Now, io has officially announced its merger with OpenAI, with a clear mission: to create a series of entirely new AI devices that enable people to use AI to create all kinds of wonderful things.

Why Current Devices Aren't Worthy of AI

In the video, Jony Ive raised a remarkably insightful point: the products we currently use to connect with and access AI are fundamentally decades old. Laptops, smartphones — these are "legacy products."

To understand this perspective, we need to look at the historical evolution of human-computer interaction paradigms. HCI has undergone several major shifts: the command-line interface (CLI) of the 1960s-70s required users to memorize commands; the 1984 Macintosh popularized the graphical user interface (GUI), turning operations into desktop metaphors; the 2007 iPhone introduced multi-touch, completely restructuring the interaction logic of mobile computing. Each paradigm shift dramatically lowered the barrier to use and gave birth to entirely new application ecosystems. The emergence of large language models is now viewed by many researchers as the starting point of the fourth paradigm shift — natural language is poised to become the primary interaction medium, but existing hardware form factors (screen + keyboard) remain artifacts of the previous era, creating a clear structural mismatch with AI's capability boundaries.

He gave a vivid example: if you want to ask ChatGPT a question right now, you need to pull out your laptop, open it, launch a browser, start typing, explain the context, hit enter, and wait for a response. That's already the limit of what a laptop as a tool can do. But Jony believes AI as a technology deserves a better vessel.

This point hits the mark. Current AI interaction is essentially still trapped in the "screen + keyboard + mouse" paradigm — a paradigm born in the personal computer era, long before the emergence of large language models. Just as the touchscreen redefined mobile computing, the AI era may require an entirely new interaction form factor.

Notably, io isn't the first company attempting to build dedicated hardware for AI. Humane's AI Pin integrated a projector and camera into a brooch form factor, emphasizing screen-free interaction, but received a cold market reception due to slow response times and limited functionality. Rabbit's R1 device attracted attention with its retro orange design and AI agent-based approach to operating phone apps, but similarly failed to achieve sustained market acceptance. These predecessors' failures reveal the core challenges facing AI hardware: the gap between AI capabilities and user expectations, the computational tension between battery life and real-time inference, and how to present complex information without a screen. Whether io can learn from these cautionary tales will be one of the key variables determining its success or failure.

io's First Product: Sam Altman Calls It "The Coolest Tech Product Ever"

Although io didn't reveal the specific product form factor in this announcement, Sam Altman's assessment was extraordinarily bold. He revealed that Jony had called to tell him "this is the best work our team has ever done" — keep in mind, this statement comes from the designer of the iPhone and MacBook Pro.

Sam also mentioned that he recently received a prototype of the device and took it home to experience for a while. His verdict: "I think this is going to be the coolest tech product ever made in the history of the world."

The weight of this assessment should not be underestimated. Sam Altman has seen countless cutting-edge tech products, and Jony Ive's design track record is unmatched. For both to give such high praise simultaneously suggests that this product genuinely offers something breakthrough in concept and experience.

io's Design Philosophy: Making AI Technology Serve Everyone

The foundation of the collaboration between Jony and Sam isn't just alignment on technical vision — it's a deep consistency in values.

Jony particularly emphasized the concept of democratization: "I want everyone to be able to have it. I don't want it to be just that small group of people — those who are smart enough to figure out how to use crappy tools — who get to enjoy the power of AI. I want anyone to be able to say: 'Hey, I have an idea, let's make it happen.'"

This statement directly addresses a deep pain point with current AI tools — the barrier of Prompt Engineering. Prompt engineering refers to the skill of carefully designing input text to guide large language models toward producing high-quality outputs, and one's proficiency in this skill directly determines how well a user can harness AI's potential. The same question, when posed with an optimized prompt, can yield dramatically different answer quality. This objectively creates a new digital divide: users with stronger technical backgrounds can skillfully wield AI tools, while ordinary users often feel confused or disappointed. While companies like OpenAI continue to optimize models' instruction-understanding capabilities, the fundamental solution may need to come from the interaction interface level — which is precisely the core problem io is trying to solve through hardware design.

This statement reveals io's core design philosophy: lowering the barrier to AI use, making technology truly accessible to everyone.

Why San Francisco Was Chosen as io's Headquarters

In the video, Jony spent considerable time discussing what San Francisco means to him. As a Brit who moved to America drawn by "the exhilarating optimism of San Francisco and Silicon Valley," he's deeply grateful to the city.

He pointed out that it's no coincidence that so many breakthrough innovations happen in the Bay Area and not elsewhere on the planet. San Francisco's unique geography, culture, and embrace of freedom — "you can't cherry-pick freedom; either you let creative freedom express itself in all its weird ways, or you don't have it at all."