📱Design: Heeeeeere's Jony!

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🤖 Ive is bringing hardware to AI

Let’s go back a bit before we look ahead.

Jony Ive left Apple in 2019, having spent 27 years with the firm leading and influencing design on the iPhone, iPod, iPad, iOS, iMac, Macbook, Apple Watch, the company HQ Apple Park, and the now ubiquitous Apple Stores around the world. Since then, he’s been working on his own design collective firm, LoveFrom, and something called io that he founded last year as he began collaborating with OpenAI. It is this firm which OpenAI is acquiring at a staggering $6.5 billion, bringing Ive and his team into the ever extending tentacles of the ChatGPT maker.

In this issue of Signpost, we analyse the announcement of Ive’s return to the tech space from the perspective of the design news media, including Dezeen, the most respected and influential design news media in the world, and the well known tech and design-focused business magazine Fast Company.

🤝🏻 DEZEEN: Jony Ive and OpenAI join forces to create "new family of products" [link]

📢 What Dezeen is saying
Dezeen focuses a lot on the joint press release from Ive and Altman. The article also attempts to explain why this is happening by pulling quotes from previous interviews of the two men from The New York Times.

1. 📸 Visuals

One visual is used in this article, and it’s the visual that OpenAI shared with the media. In it, we see headshots of OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman, standing in front of Jony Ive. Altman is staring straight into the camera, with a smirk on his face. On his right is Ive, who head is tilted towards Altman’s. Ive is wearing thick black frames, and is smiling slightly. Ive also wears what looks like a hoodie, but could simply be a t-shirt. Ive’s left hand is draped around Altman’s left shoulder.

The photo is in black and white, so it is unclear what the background colour of the photo is and what colours the two men are wearing.

2. ✍🏽 Words

The headline states clearly what this new relationship is about: a “new family of products”.

The article starts with the news of the OpenAI acquisition of Ive’s io startup ‘in a bid to create products for artificial intelligence technology’. Altman is then described as ‘formerly of Google’, before the article confirms that Ive only founded io ‘a year ago’. Beyond this, there is mention of Ive being ‘known for his design of the Apple iPhone’, and how he will ‘work with OpenAI’s product and engineering teams in San Francisco’.

A quote attributed to both men follows, saying that Ive will “assume deep design and creative responsibilities across OpenAI and IO”. The article then confirms that both companies admitted to have been working “quietly” with each other for the last two years, though ‘there have been no details’ on any new products.

To help explain this marriage, the article quotes the two men from The New York Times, saying that both have had “some misgivings” about ‘the design of the iPhone’, adding Altman ‘doesn’t “feel good about [his] relationship with technology right now”’. Despite the article admitting that the iPhone is ‘perhaps one of the most widely known [designs] of the last 20 years’, it quotes Ive as being excited about how his entire 30-year experience has culminated to this collaboration with OpenAI. Once again, quoting from The New York Times, the article mentions that Ive ‘will maintain a degree of independence while working under the OpenAI banner’. It is only at the end of the article that OpenAI’s ‘purchase of IO for $6.5 billion’ is mentioned.

❓ What it means
Dezeen’s focus on the joint press release means we get a lot of quotes from Ive and Altman, including even their slightly odd, almost GenAI-like photo. I’m not sure why it’s in black and white, but it does remind of me Steve Jobs’ iconic photo from the cover of Walter Isaacson’s biography. I suppose the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

The article highlights both men’s “misgivings” with the design of the iPhone, which is something that Ive helped to design. Again, I’m not sure how to interpret this — if Altman doesn’t like the design, why did he just bring on board the man most famously associated with the design of the iPhone? If Ive doesn’t like the design, is he saying that he believes he’ll design better products with Altman than he ever did with Jobs?

The price of the acquisition is only revealed towards the end of the article. Perhaps Dezeen believes that $6.5 billion is less important than the partnership between the two men.

The image puts Altman at the forefront, with Ive at the back, perhaps signifying the power dynamic in the relationship, indicating who we should really be paying attention to.

⚠️ Why it matters
Paying $6.5 billion for a one year-old company seems ridiculous, but it’s really more than that. This is an acqui-hire, where a company has been acquired really to hire the people running it. It’s also the most high profile move by OpenAI in a long time, especially considering the news coming out of the company for the last couple of years hasn’t been particularly great (including the departure of high profile executives, the move to for-profit and then Public Benefit Corporation, and the dismissal and reappointment of Altman as CEO). OpenAI has been more in the news of late for company politics rather than any of their products. This acquisition refocuses the world’s attention back onto the products, and what comes next.

I will say though, the image is a weird hard sell. They are trying to look like partners/friends/compatriots for whom working together is the most natural thing. Except it looks like something ChatGPT spat out based on a prompt that says “make an image of two smug looking men staring into the camera with an inflated sense of their own self worth, but make it look casual”.

🦾 FAST COMPANY: OpenAI acquires Jony Ive’s hardware firm, io, to create AI devices [link]

📢 What Fast Company is saying
The article in the design+tech+business publication is very personal and gossipy. The article is almost written as an opinion piece, heavily leaning on Ive’s Apple connections.

1. 📸 Visuals

Once again, there is only one visual for this article, yet it is highly edited and stylised. The photo shows both Ive and Altman. Ive is on the left of the image, looking ahead, while Altman is toward the right of the image, looking off to the side. It looks like Altman is standing behind Ive. Both men are in dark suits, dark ties, and white shirts, with Altman sporting white dots on his tie along with a brooch of a rooster on his lapel. Ive is in his trademark glasses.

Both men are in black and white against a multicoloured kaleidoscopic background with tons of lens flare. Between Ive and Altman is an amorphous shape that bears a striking similarity with the Great Sphinx of Giza.

2. ✍🏽 Words

The article is written like an opinion piece, and though short, includes a lot of personal perspective from the writer. The headline efficiently summarises the story, before the subheading adds more details, confirming that the team is ‘stocked with ex-Apple talent’, who will ‘develop the future of AI products’.

The article begins with the most emotive first sentence of any article I’ve read recently — ‘it was perhaps the worst kept secret in Silicon Valley’. Following this, the article provides a quick summary of Ive’s many companies, followed by the writer’s description of io, which he claims is working on ‘what some have oversimplified as the iPhone of AI’ or, to be more specific, ‘the physical side of OpenAI’s groundbreaking software’.

Here is where the article mentions the $6.5 billion price tag for the acquisition of io, following which it quotes directly from the news release. The article provides detail on some of the names mentioned in the news release who are listed as co-founders of io, including Scott Cannon who ‘led teams on the Mac and iPad development’, Evans Hankey who ‘was a senior member of the Apple design team who took over Ive’s own role after he left Apple’, and Tang Tan who ‘led design on the iPhone for years’.

Finally, the article asks the question we’re all asking: ‘what are they [Ive and team] doing with OpenAI, exactly?’, before answering that ‘io will be making products, plural’ for Altman at some point in the future. Wrapping up, the article frames this as ‘the greatest called bluff in Silicon Valley history’, saying how ‘the most hyped AI company of our age is teaming up with the makers of the most defining consumer hardware of the last century’.

❓ What it means
While there is not much more information in this article than the one in Dezeen, it is much more entertaining. One main callout from this article is that this acquisition is almost expected. I suppose those of us closer to the ground in Silicon Valley would’ve seen this coming, but for the rest of us it is still news.

The image used is also significant. Here we see Ive as the main focus, with Altman in the background, unlike the image from OpenAI that was used in the Dezeen article. Perhaps this indicates where the real centre of power lies between the two gentlemen?

Finally, there is a lot of focus on the strong Apple connection between Ive and the rest of his team. Crucially, the article ends with calling Apple’s design team as having made ‘the most defining consumer hardware of the last century’. Not this century. Is their relevance in question?

⚠️ Why it matters
As entertaining as this article is to read, a couple of critical questions are not answered, similarly as they are skipped over in the Dezeen article:

1. What was the $6.5 billion valuation based on?

2. While the credibility of Ive and his design team is unquestionable, have they already done their best work while at Apple?

3. How often does brand new, culture defining hardware really come about?

WHAT’S GOING ON? 

⛓️‍💥 It’s called hardware for a reason

There’s no secret that developing successful, culturally relevant and persistent hardware is tremendously difficult. I would argue that since the iPhone, which came out in 2007, there’s been no new hardware that has become so ubiquitous and essential to daily life as the smartphone. The biggest companies in the world since then have been built pretty much exclusively on the internet, with products and services living online, accessed from our smartphones and computers. Hardware is expensive to design, to develop, and to distribute.

Which begs the question, why does OpenAI want to get into the hardware space? Like Google is to search, ChatGPT is to GenAI. People are already using it extensively on existing technology and infrastructure. Without having to distract itself to build the entire supply chain for getting it’s products to users, OpenAI can, currently, focus exclusively on making it’s service the best in the world.

Maybe it’s a B2B play? But then why bring on board the most famous designers from consumer electronics? And speaking of, I understand the focus here has been to hire Ive and his team, and the cleanest way to do so was to acquire his company, but $6.5 billion (!) for a one year-old company? That has to be some kind of record, right? And we don’t even know what they do. What do OpenAI investors think about this?

Now, here’s a question that has not come up but I cannot stop thinking about: have Ive and team passed their prime? Is it possible that their best work is behind them? It’s a harsh assessment of arguably the most famous and successful consumer electronic designers ever, but it is a question worth asking. This doesn’t take away from all they’ve done, but this deal does remind me of Android founder Andy Rubin’s failed smartphone brand Essential, and former Disney executive and DreamWorks co-founder Jeffrey Katzenberg’s wildly unsuccessful media startup Quibi, which died just as TikTok soared.

Which brings another question to mind — were all these men so successful because of the big brand and distribution arm attached to their products? While Ive’s design was consequential to the success of the iPhone, it can be argued that Apple’s existing brand and ubiquity helped to get as many iPhones into as many people’s hands as possible. Same can be said for Google’s massive and deep-pocketed footprint for getting Rubin’s Android devices into stores, or Disney’s bulletproof brand that pulled existing customers into cinemas to watch Katzenberg’s movies (even if DreamWorks was a brand new studio, it was built immediately after he left Disney, unlike the delay between Rubin’s departure from Android and founding Essential, by which time the world had moved on).

Will Ive do the same for OpenAI? Will his designs truly usher in a whole new “family of devices”? Or will this combust spectacularly in another year, with OpenAI’s market share eroded by competitors not distracted by hardware?

The truth, as always, is somewhere in between.
Read widely. Question thoroughly. Decide accordingly.

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Was this forwarded to you? Signpost is a free weekly newsletter analysing what the media says, what it means, and why it matters. It’s free to subscribe. Alternatively, you can add me on LinkedIn.