An ‘iPhone of AI’ Makes No Sense. What Is Jony Ive Really Building?

Gently does it. In the past week or so, we’ve had a logo upgrade, a big New York Times profile, and a Moncler outerwear collaboration from LoveFrom, Jony Ive and Marc Newson’s San Francisco–headquartered design studio. The real news, though, is confirmation that LoveFrom is working with OpenAI’s founder Sam Altman to build a secretive as-yet-unnamed AI device with investors including Laurene Powell Jobs’ Emerson Collective, and Ive himself.

The former Apple chief design officer is sometimes gently mocked for his obsession with seemingly small details, but when it comes to a potential mainstream human-AI interface, the man who has spent the past five years preoccupied with buttons—going so far as to create a five-volume history of garment fasteners—could be, in a somewhat inevitable way, the exact kind of person required to walk this particular tightrope of ethics and ambition.

Details so far are scarce but revealing, at least where intentions are concerned. LoveFrom is designing “a product that uses AI to create a computing experience that is less socially disruptive than the iPhone.” What form the device will take and when it will be released are still to be determined. The language points to a consumer mass-market device to, in theory, access ChatGPT and Dall-E, and rival the likes of just-announced Apple Intelligence features, which include typing requests, prompts to Siri, and pointing the camera for visual queries on the latest-gen iPhone 16.

Not everyone thinks this is an appealing prospect. “To me, AI on smartphones, especially in social media, are just a pathetic continuation of the same business model that has been exploitative to consumers for decades,” says industrial designer and Fuseproject founder Yves Béhar. “I find the efforts in using AI for our daily communications and social media just more of the same, as it only serves the attention economy, and isn’t contributing to society.”

A key mystery of the LoveFrom and OpenAI news (LoveFrom declined to comment for this story) is whether this future device is indeed one thing—to perhaps succeed in focus and execution where the Humane Ai Pin (4/10 from WIRED) and Rabbit R1 (3/10 from WIRED) accessories have failed—or a system of connected components.

And so, will the product need the processing power to run some or all functions on device, or will it rely on the cloud? Here, the industrial and UI design proposals could shape the security and privacy decisions. Another design dilemma on Ive’s desk will be whether the main thing will have a display at all, and what that could look like. Reporting in the Financial Times last September, citing anonymous sources familiar with the discussions, said that the OpenAI collaboration presented an opportunity to create a way of interacting with computers that is “less reliant on screens,” and that there were many different ideas on the table. During NYT reporter Tripp Mickle’s visit to the LoveFrom HQ, he spotted papers and cardboard boxes featuring the “earliest ideas” for the device(s) being wheeled from one office to another.

At this point, phrases like ambient computing, ubiquitous computing, and even (shudder) Internet of Things may be zipping and popping around your brain. Are we back here again? If the answer is yes, it might not be a reason to despair. Béhar cites Embodied’s Moxie companion robot, ElliQ’s elder care, and the Happiest Baby robotic bassinet as examples of AI-powered devices which actually “solve specific human needs”—but it should be noted Béhar is involved in all these products. He says, “We are designing these experiences to be directly embedded into the actual physical element of these products, rather than your smartphone. This lightens the reliance to do everything on a personal device, and we find that these solutions are not socially disruptive and actually more magical in their use.”

Just last week, Sir Jonathan Ive was handing out degrees to Royal College of Art and Imperial College graduates at the Royal Festival Hall ceremony in London, as befitting his role as an elder statesman of design. Stephen Green, head of the joint Innovation Design Engineering program between the two universities, suggests that Ive is the perfect candidate to scoop up and metabolize all the post-smartphone, post-screen experiments we’ve seen come and go over the past decade, whether that’s voice agents—which Green believes needs to be used in combination, not solo—wearables, Bluetooth beacons for greater fidelity at a location level, signal processing, olfactory sensors (OK, perhaps we’re not quite ready for that last one).

“Historically speaking, that was the beauty of Apple with Steve Jobs,” says Green. “Ultimately a marketing person with great technological foresight, and able to, with what’s sometimes referred to as design leadership, bring an amazing team of people and investors around him to make that happen. So, obviously, Jony Ive has many of those ingredients that are needed, with the backing that can coalesce around him, to achieve amazing critical mass to do something innovative. Because a lot of the technology and possibility is out there.”

The original rumors and reports referred, of course, to an “iPhone of AI,” in the sense of a super successful device that allows everyday people to access cutting-edge technology. It’s likely that the dominant component in any era-shaping system cooked up by LoveFrom and OpenAI will define itself against the iPhone. The mentions of social disruption and reliance on screens do chime with Ive’s somewhat elusive comments through the years on smartphones and social media addiction.

Ive is on record as saying he has limited his children’s screen time. When pressed by Anna Wintour on stage at the WIRED25 Summit in 2018 as to whether we are now “too connected,” he responded: “The nature of innovation is that you cannot predict all the consequences. In my experience, there have been surprising consequences. Some fabulous, and some less so.”

One possible kindred spirit, both in terms of breaking away from smartphone norms and San Francisco culture, is Anjan Katta, the founder of Daylight, whose DC-1 tablet goes against the grain with a 60-fps paperlike display. He says that the harmful components of our current consumer tech, including blue light, flicker, and addiction-inducing notifications, can make us sicker and more anxious. “As someone who has directly experienced the extreme downsides of modern technology, including eye strain, disrupted circadian rhythm, exacerbation of ADHD symptoms, and mental health concerns like anxiety and depression,” he says, “I wholeheartedly embrace the push to create personal computing devices that don’t consume such a large share of our time and energy.”

So does this potential paradigm shift in human-machine interaction offer a chance for Ive to clean up some of the chaos of the past 20 years of consumer tech with more prosocial ideas? Chaos he played a part in creating? “I don’t buy the idea that Jony Ive is trying to atone,” says Craig Bunyan, associate director for creative technology at strategic design agency Seymourpowell. “The industrial design of the device didn’t create the toxic social media culture, fuel doomscrolling, or empower anonymous trolls to spread hate.”

That said, we could be at a “threshold” similar to that of the birth of the smartphone. Bunyan lists voice controls, ambient notifications, and contextually aware responses as possible options for an AI-powered system which engages us without asking for constant conscious interaction or even consent. Whether or not Jony Ive is our “digital savior,” he is interested in tech which “seamlessly integrates with the rhythms of human interaction,” and his colleague Mariel Brown, director of foresight, suggests the French concept of savoir faire as a model to aim for with generative AI itself. “The ability to navigate social situations with ease could greatly enhance the value proposition of current virtual assistants,” she says. “It brings up questions of autonomy and free will. The stakes are high, as these systems will be tasked with maintaining a delicate balance between convenience and personal agency.”

At this point, it’s important to note that we can semiretire Spike Jonze’s film Her when discussing how AI might be personified and realized in the world (though admittedly we could see a system that’s a mix of beautifully crafted items and near-invisible accessories). We hope the vision board at LoveFrom HQ features the recent A24 show Sunny, streaming on Apple TV+ and set in a near-future Kyoto where “HomeBot” are the norm.

The titular assistant robot was built for showrunner Katie Robbins by Wētā Workshop, but it’s the in-the-background, post-screen computing that really feels aspirational. Rashida Jones’ Suzie and company operate a retrofuturistic flipout handheld “phone.” This (very cleverly) doubles as a charging case for a single smart earbud, which handles real-time translation, and seamlessly hands off images and video to enormous at-home projectors. The phone aesthetic was based on 1960s Japanese lighters, and the paperlike electronic displays aim to mimic shoji screens. It’s all very chic, and it could be details like the earbud charging, more so than, say, Humane’s laser projector, which make all the difference.

LoveFrom’s Road Trip

Searching for more clues in the back catalog, modularity and sustainability appear to be two throughlines of LoveFrom’s work to date, which includes the just-launched Moncler collection of a field jacket, down jacket, parka, and poncho. The $2,000-plus jacket has been designed specifically to be made from a single piece of fabric, and features two-part magnetic aluminum, steel, and brass buttons which snap to connect the modular inner and outer elements. LoveFrom has also been tapped to bring an Apple Watch–like digital “touch” to Ferrari interiors, and the team even built a prototype steering wheel based on its race car and sports car heritage to present to Ferrari’s owners, the Agnelli family.

Ive, Newson, and their teams have been noodling around in luxury design collaborations for five years—including a pro bono, limited edition Linn Sondek LP-12 record player—like your favorite jazz musician’s favorite jazz musicians. Ive’s notorious fastidiousness has manifested in LoveFrom’s long gestated serif typeface (a take on the Baskerville font), a coronation emblem for King Charles III, and his San Francisco architecture projects focused around the LoveFrom HQ.

It’s unclear how much work LoveFrom has undertaken for Apple, though it’s said to be one of LoveFrom’s first clients. Spending tens of millions of dollars with the hope of turning parking lots into city scenes and green spaces; ignoring financial advice on urban real estate; taking on prestige projects for free: These are the actions of a man who has escaped.

And he’s taken a good chunk of Apple staffers with him. Alongside Marc Newson, a renowned industrial designer in his own right who was brought in around development of the Apple Watch, this includes Evans Hankey and Tang Tan. Both Hankey, who became Apple’s VP of industrial design when Ive left in 2019, and Tan, former VP of iPhone and Apple Watch product design at Cupertino, are now working on the secretive AI device startup.

Imperial’s Stephen Green suggests that Ive and Newson appear to have built a culture at LoveFrom which allows for the kind of freedom and methodologies you find at research labs and institutions. “I always like the story, which he mentions, that his father was a design and technology teacher, and he grew up with that very practical hands-on approach to the physical world around him,” he says. “So Jonathan Ive will always be associated with the hardware of things. But as humans, we’ve got a huge amount of these latent psychomotor skills, you know, the relationship between touching and feeling and what we do with our hands and then our brains and how we process information.”

This approach, Green says, could be crucial to developing responsible AI hardware. “Part of untapping that potential with what we do is super accelerated lo-fi prototyping really early on in product development processes,” he explains. “Because then, you can use Wizard of Oz techniques [for autonomous interfaces], and you can role play, you can start to actually try out a bunch of these concepts in a way that academics fretting over AI ethics in a Cambridge boardroom will never be able to do.”

Ive told the New York Times that he has hired around 10 staffers for the new AI hardware company so far, and a scan of LinkedIn yields what we’d suggest are a few more potential names who are working for LoveFrom: designer Chris Wilson, the former head of UI design at Apple, who was involved in the LoveFrom serif typeface; CC Wan Si Wan, an Apple veteran with 15-plus years as a designer and human interface designer; Kevin Will Chen, a design manager for Apple Watch for nine years; plus ex-Apple interface and industrial designers Biotz Natera Olalde, Jon Gomez, and Joe Luxton, as well as former Nest user interface designer Mike Matas. (Not to mention the poached staffers in executive operations, talent development, production, and communications.)

There is the sense, then, that LoveFrom has Apple-level talent, as close as it will get to Apple-level money—with plans to raise as much as $1 billion in funding by the end of this year—and, with Sam Altman involved, Apple-level ambitions.

“AI can be an accelerant,” says Daylight’s Anjan Katta. “You pour it on a modern computer and it’s now 10 times more addicting, overstimulating, and zombifying. The soul of computing is rotten at its core, and AI can make it so much more weaponized to our psyche.”

“However, if we made fundamentally new computers that are completely rethought and actually aligned with our intentions and then imbued with AI, we may just redeem computing as amplifiers of our humanity, rather than degraders.” Katta adds: “I’m excited at the possibility Mr. Ive is creating by not just starting with AI, but with a new computing soul, seeing it as the means of making more humane computers.”

Apple staffers never pass up the chance to tell a good story. And if you look at the story that Jony Ive and LoveFrom are trying to tell via the interviews—the Moncler launch, the collaborations with heritage brands, the animated Montgomery bear logo, even the button book—it’s one of care, of craft, and of stewardship. It’s also one of chic rebellion from the tech bro norm. These are the rarified qualities required to be paid a reported $200 million a year from clients.

They are also all principles which could be very useful in steering and shaping some of OpenAI’s activities in the years ahead. That’s if the approaches of “move fast and break things” and earnest, meticulous iteration can work together.