OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, is developing a piece of consumer hardware that its leaders describe as the beginning of a new device category rather than another slab of glass. The project pairs chief executive Sam Altman with Jony Ive, the designer most closely associated with the original iPhone, and it is aimed squarely at the idea that people should not have to stare at a screen to use artificial intelligence.
Reports about the gadget have circulated for more than a year, but the outline has grown steadily clearer. The plan centers on a small, largely screenless companion device built to keep an AI assistant within reach at all times. The ambition is not modest, and the framing keeps returning to the same provocative question: what happens to the smartphone once talking to software, rather than tapping at it, becomes the default.
A $6.5 billion bet on Jony Ive’s hardware startup
The foundation of the effort is OpenAI’s acquisition of io, the hardware startup Ive co-founded. OpenAI agreed to buy the company in an all-stock deal valued at roughly $6.5 billion, one of the largest acquisitions in its history. Ive did not join OpenAI as an employee; instead his design firm, LoveFrom, took over design work across the company, while dozens of io’s hardware engineers, software developers and manufacturing specialists moved to OpenAI to build the product. The structure signals how seriously OpenAI is treating industrial design, an area where its rivals in artificial intelligence have far less pedigree.
What the device is reported to be
Descriptions gathered from people briefed on the plans point to a compact object roughly the size of a smartphone or smaller, without a traditional display, meant to be carried or kept nearby and to respond to voice and its surroundings. Coverage of the early prototypes describes a pocketable, screenless assistant intended to sit alongside a phone and a laptop rather than replace either outright at first. The pitch is that an always-available assistant, aware of context and able to see and hear, could absorb many of the small errands people now perform by unlocking a phone and hunting through apps. Whether that experience is genuinely faster than a screen for everyday tasks is the central unanswered question.
Why replacing the phone is both the promise and the catch
Executives have been careful to frame the product as a new category, but the long-term logic is unmistakable. If an assistant can hear, see and speak well enough, the display becomes optional for a growing share of tasks, and the phone’s grip on daily attention loosens. That vision runs straight into the problems that sank earlier AI-first gadgets. The Humane Ai Pin and the Rabbit R1, two heavily hyped attempts at screenless or minimal-screen AI hardware, drew harsh reviews for slow responses, thin functionality and battery limitations, and both struggled to justify themselves next to a capable smartphone. OpenAI’s advantage is that it controls the underlying models, but hardware remains a discipline apart from shipping software.
When it might arrive
OpenAI has signaled an aggressive timeline. A company executive told Axios the first device is aimed at 2026, and OpenAI leaders have separately said that prototypes already exist and that a public debut is targeted for the second half of the year. Hardware schedules slip often, and analysts caution that even if a reveal lands on time, broad consumer availability could stretch into 2027 as manufacturing scales. Price has not been confirmed, though some reports have placed the device in the low hundreds of dollars, a range chosen to reach a mass audience rather than early adopters alone.
The stakes for a software company moving into hardware
Building physical products means grappling with supply chains, retail, repairs, accessories and regulatory testing, none of which OpenAI has done at scale. The strategic reasoning is nonetheless clear: whoever owns the everyday hardware layer owns the most valuable real estate in consumer technology, and OpenAI does not want its assistant to live only inside a phone made by Apple or Google. Trade coverage has noted that details on the upcoming hardware device keep surfacing alongside new model releases, a sign the company is trying to knit its software and hardware roadmaps together so that the device debuts with capabilities no phone assistant can match.
For now the gadget remains unreleased, and much about it is unconfirmed, from its final form and materials to how it will handle privacy for a device designed to sense its environment. What is not in doubt is the direction of the spending. OpenAI has committed billions of dollars and its most storied design talent to making sure that the next dominant way people reach an AI assistant is one it builds, rather than one it merely rents on someone else’s screen.
This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by the Morning Overview editorial team.
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