As Jony Ive and Sam Altman hugged and sipped espressos at a picturesque North Beach cafe in May 2025, a new war was brewing. The coffee date was featured in a viral video to announce that Altman’s OpenAI was acquiring io Products, a small hardware startup founded by Ive, the legendary designer of the Apple iPhone and perhaps the world’s most famous tech product designer.
Their alliance signaled a brazen ambition to build the next great consumer product—this time for the AI age, and a bet that OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, could unseat the likes of Apple using the iPhone maker’s former design star.
Now, before any products have even been released, a scorched-earth lawsuit from Apple that accuses OpenAI of trade secret theft has thrown those plans into chaos, raising the stakes for the AI startup—and Ive—to deliver a flawless, high-profile hit device.
OpenAI’s device, expected to ship as early as next year, is still something of a mystery. A recent Bloomberg report citing anonymous sources described it as a home-speaker-like device that will serve as an active AI companion and feature moving mechanical parts designed to mimic human behavior.
A source familiar with OpenAI’s plans told Fortune that the design of the initial hardware device has been finalized, while work on a broader family of AI devices proceeds.
