One of The Principal iPhone Architects to Create Challenger
- Editor OGN Daily
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Apple’s former chief designer Sir Jony Ive has joined OpenAI in a $6.5bn (£4.8bn) deal aimed at toppling the iPhone.
OpenAI is buying an untested startup for a whopping $6.4 billion, the ChatGPT maker’s biggest known acquisition yet. The hardware startup, called io, was founded by Apple design guru Jony Ive, famous for being one of the principal architects of the iPhone, reports The Guardian. Ive left Apple in 2019 after a 27-year career as one of the company’s foremost product designers. He’s known for simple and clean aesthetics that pay attention to small details like packaging and font, and was described by Steve Jobs as his “spiritual partner” at the company. One of his early groundbreaking designs was the brightly coloured bubble-shaped iMac computer. From there, he went on to design the first iPod, iPhone, MacBook Air, Apple Watch and AirPods.
OpenAI on Wednesday announced the takeover of io Products, the San Francisco start-up founded by Sir Jony and a group of other ex-Apple designers just last year, reports The Telegraph. The takeover paves the way for Sir Jony, the Briton famed for designing some of Apple’s most iconic products, to create a new generation of devices that aims to challenge the iPhone as the dominant piece of modern hardware.
In the first quarter of its 2025 fiscal year, Apple generated around $69 billion in revenue from the sales of iPhones, and has sold more than two billion of them since its launch in 2007.
Sir Jony - knighted at Buckingham Palace in 2012 - and his the team at io had already developed a prototype product based on AI before OpenAI made its bid. Sam Altman, CEO of ChatGPT, said: “Jony called one day and said: ‘This is the best work our team has ever done.’ I mean, Jony did the iPhone, Jony did the MacBook Pro. These are like the defining ways people use technology. It’s hard to beat those things. Those are really wonderful.”
He claimed the prototype was “the coolest piece of technology that the world will have ever seen.” Mr Altman added: “AI is such a big leap forward in terms of what people can do that it needs a new kind of computing form factor to get the maximum potential out of it.”
So, the good news is that we can almost certainly look forward to new devices that are even cooler and more functional than Apple's tech line up. Why else would ChatGPT pay over $6 billion an untested start up?