On the Ive-Altman Case for a Mini Portable Speaker: The Case For a Tablet, a Necklace or an iPod Shuffle?
Like most other hardware companies, Ive and Altman have been working on earbuds. The company is going to bundle hardware into its subscriptions in order to decrease the company’s reliance on Apple and the internet. With his association with Apple in the back-view mirror, Ive is ready to take on the company he helped build.
I suspected that was a case of a mini portable speaker scenario after the news broke. Then earlier today, notable supply chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo claimed that the current prototype is “slightly larger than the AI Pin, with a form factor as compact and elegant as an iPod Shuffle.” A potential use case involves you wearing it around the neck, that there’ll be cameras and microphones, and that it will connect with smartphones and computers.
These ingredients are what enable the ability to connect to a large model, see what you see, answer questions, and last long enough to be useful in many scenarios. Big Tech has mostly landed on glasses and pins since these are some of the parameters. The average person doesn’t know if they’ll want a display. Ive and Altman seem not to think so.
An educated guess right now would need to include a few key elements, combined with a good-faith reading of what’s been leaked. Correcting the fact that Ive is in particular is a great trick at misdirection. There are a few things artificial intelligence gadgets have in common.
Early prototypes of the device exist (Altman mentioned taking one home in his promo video with Ive). Altman told OpenAI employees this week that it will be able to sit on a desk or be carried around. It is rumored that it will be the size of an iPod Shuffle and be worn like a necklace.
A senior reporter with 13 years of experience covers health tech and more. She worked for both PC Magazine and Gizmodo.
There were several interesting announcements at Build this week, including Elon Musk’s Grok model coming to Azure and Microsoft’s bet on how to evolve the plumbing of the web for AI agents. The company’s keynotes were disrupted by protesters who wanted to protest the business it does with Israel. The situation got so tense that Microsoft tried to prevent employees from writing “Palestine,” “Gaza” and “Genocide” in internal emails.
In San Francisco, the company introduced its Claude 4 models, which they claim are the world’s best for coding. Anthropic is positioning itself as a model arms dealer because of all the competition between Openai,google, and Meta. It was clear that Windsurf, which was in the process of being sold, was not given first dibs on the new models. If the models are countries, it’s like a trade ban. (Also, what does it say about the state of the industry when the supposed safety-first AI lab is releasing models that it knows want to blackmail people ?)
Google, meanwhile, was firing on all cylinders this week. A mode in searches is being rolled out across the board. It has a confusing product strategy, but it is starting to leverage the huge amount of data it has on people to differentiate what it can do. In a way that people want to use it in, it will keep a lot of people away from chatting with one another.
OpenAI buying the “io” hardware division of Jony Ive’s design studio, LoveFrom, is a delightfully petty bit of SEO sabotage, though I’m told the name stands for “input output” and was decided a while ago. Even still, the news of Ive and Altman teaming up quickly shifted the conversation away from what was a strong showing from Google at this year’s I/O. The dueling announcements say a lot about what are arguably the world’s two foremost AI companies: Google’s models may be technically superior and more widely deployed, but OpenAI is kicking everyone’s ass at capturing mindshare and buzz.
I ended his agreement with Apple in the year after he met Altman. Ive was not allowed to work on products that could compete with Apple because of the lucrative deal. Ive and Altman will be joining forces to announce a voice-first device later next year.
Speaking of buzz, it’s worth looking past the headlines to what OpenAI actually announced this week: it’s paying $6.5 billion in equity to hire roughly 55 people from LoveFrom, including ex-Apple design leaders Evans Hankey, Tang Tan, and Scott Cannon. Peter Welinder is an Openai product leader that reports directly to the CEO. The rest of LoveFrom’s designers are staying with Ive, who is currently designing the first-ever electric Ferrari and advising the man who introduced him to the late Brian Chesky. Ive and Love From will be taking up deep design and creative responsibilities at OpenAI.
The leaders of OpenAI and Google have been living rent-free in each other’s heads since ChatGPT caught the world by storm. Heading into this week’s I/O, Googlers were on edge about whether Sam Altman would try to upstage their show like last year, when OpenAI held an event the day before to showcase ChatGPT’s advanced voice mode.
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