I have a different take on the Jony Ive + OpenAI news…
On Wednesday, OpenAI made the huge announcement that it had purchased former Apple Chief Design Officer Jony Ive’s company io for nearly $7 billion, and that io would merge into OpenAI. Together, Jony Ive and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman (both of whom appear in the awkward photo above that OpenAI released) will work on some kind of groundbreaking ChatGPT-based hardware product, and that Ive and his team (that includes several ex-Apple designers)will focus on the design of the product.
Ive, of course, worked hand in glove with Steve Jobs for over two decades at Apple, where Jobs was the product visionary, and Ive the generational design talent. The two of them combined their powers to give the world the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad, and many other products. After Jobs died, Ive stayed on at Apple for eight more years and collaborated with Apple independently for another three, helping to deliver AirPods and the Apple Watch.
This news comes at what many perceive to be a perilous time for Apple, as Apple has struggled to react to the tech industry’s pivot to generative AI. There have been reports of dysfunction within Apple’s leadership around AI efforts, which led to last year’s WWDC keynote in which Apple announced Apple Intelligence features that it has been unable to ship, and which led to a shakeup of the Siri team’s leadership and personnel. Meanwhile, rival companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, and Google have made big leaps forward. Between that and unrest regarding Apple’s App Store business, even some longtime Apple watchers have called for a change of CEO at Apple.
So the announcement that OpenAI, the perceived leader in generative AI, is hiring Apple’s former rockstar design chief comes at a narratively perfect time for people to promote more doom and gloom around Apple.
Personally, I’ve maintained a bullish position on Apple’s future going back more than a quarter century, during times much darker for Apple than anything they’re going through now. There is always an “Apple is doomed” narrative out there. Additionally, I’m always deeply fascinated by how narratives get started and by what sustains them.
And if you cast your mind back to the last several years that Jony Ive was at Apple, he was frequently at the center of the “Apple is doomed” narrative of that era. I wrote the following in 2022 when the news broke that Apple and Jony Ive were no longer going to collaborate:
“In the last several years, Jony Ive became a bit of a punching bag for the corporate tech press. Anything perceived to be a failing on Apple’s part? Jony’s fault. The thing he was most often criticized for was being so hyper-focused on product thinness that usability suffered. When Apple debuted the chonkier 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro last Fall, the narrative was that this could have only happened because someone other than Jony Ive was in charge of design now.
It’s possible those things are true, but it’s mostly speculation coming from people who didn’t like some of Apple’s product decisions and were looking for someone to put the blame on. The reality is we really don’t know all of the reasons behind the specific design compromises Apple made during Ive’s tenure.”
Yet now, conveniently, Jony Ive is narratively the reason for Apple’s impending downfall because he’s now working for an Apple competitor.
Look, I genuinely hope that Jony Ive and OpenAI come up with an incredible, groundbreaking product together. I’m a Jony Ive fan, and I remained one when everyone made him the scapegoat for everything they didn’t like about Apple at the time. It’s genuinely heartwarming to hear his iconic voice waxing philosophically about technology on the video that OpenAI put out today.
But right now there’s no product. Yes, they have an internal prototype, but we have no idea what it even does, and they’re at least several months away from announcing it to the public. But OpenAI has a big challenge on their hands to get you to stop using a device like the iPhone on which you can run every AI model from every AI company (heck, ChatGPT is built into Siri), and start using a dedicated ChatGPT device. I’m not at all predicting failure, but I think we ought to all be skeptical, at least until there’s an announced product with a ship date that we can analyze on its own merits.
It’s not a stretch at all to say that there would be no Apple as we know it without Jony Ive. What remains an open question though is whether there can be a Jony Ive (as we’ve known him) without Apple. I’m excited to find out the answer to that mystery.
Your Apple Update is a reader-supported publication. If you enjoy this publication, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.