In their comprehensive report about the bombshell acquisition of Jony Ive’s AI startup by OpenAI, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman and Shirin Ghaffary said OpenAI’s CEO believed Apple’s co-founder would have been “‘damn proud’ of Ive’s latest move”.
He may be right.
Then vs. now
Jobs and Ive’s partnership has been well-documented and widely discussed over the years, so there’s no need to revisit it. What’s more interesting is what Ive’s deeply conceptual (and sometimes overly abstract) creative approach to technology might mean for what’s to come.
If you’ve read Leander Kahney’s excellent book Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products, you probably know that the Jony Ive we see today is precisely the same Jony Ive who used to “coat the back of the film with gouache” to get the transparency effect just right on a translucent sketch.
Right from the start, Ive has been passionate about two things: the creative process itself, and the meaning of its result. For better or worse, that has only deepened in the last few years.
How many times has Ive talked about intention during his interviews? How often has he gone on tangents about the way we relate to technology, and how that should make us feel?
When it was first reported that Ive and Altman were discussing a “new hardware for the age of AI”, any long-time tech enthusiast probably felt a combination of “Oh!” and “Oh…”. I sure did.
But here’s the thing: the market is currently stuck between dumb hardware ChatGPT wrappers that are rushed out as AI iPhone killers, and software ChatGPT wrappers that aren’t allowed to leverage the full potential of the iPhone as the irreplaceable mobile hub of our digital lives.
That leaves a huge gap in the AI hardware market. And this gap can only be filled by someone who actually knows what they are doing, while at the same time having enough runway not to have to turn a profit in their lifetime. That’s a pretty slim list.
Meanwhile, you just know that Ive has been sitting in his many studios and truly, deeply, earnestly thinking about what his AI hardware would do if he had infinite funding and unfettered access to the lifeblood of the frontierest of the frontier AI companies out there.
As it happens, that’s precisely what he got. Hopefully.
Filling the gap
In an alternative universe, Ive’s AI company would have been acquired by Apple, mirroring Jobs’ return when the company acquired NeXT.
But be honest: if you were Ive, with everything that he accomplished at Apple (Butterfly Keyboards and portless laptops aside), and seeing how far behind the AI game Apple will probably still be for at least a good part of the next decade (considering the competition will keep evolving), what would you do?
As flawed and PR-oriented as Steve Jobs was, he was also, at his core, an uncompromising idealist when it came to product vision, just like Ive.
And while he might have been insanely pissed to see Ive join someone else’s company to go build the best possible version of the next chapter of consumer tech, I can’t help but think he’d be a little bit relieved, or possibly proud, to see Ive go after the very best chance to go and do just that, other people’s feelings be damned. That feels pretty Jobsian to me.
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