Jony Ive has found his new Steve Jobs

It looks like Jony Ive has found his new Steve Jobs.

In a blockbuster announcement on May 21, the world’s most famous designer revealed that io, an AI hardware startup he’d quietly founded, had been acquired by entrepreneur Sam Altman’s OpenAI for a whopping $6.5 billion.

The announcement pairs the most consequential designer of the modern age with Silicon Valley’s top fundraiser and visionary. Together, they have the potential to create an entirely new class of devices that will make current smartphones and laptops look hopelessly antiquated, upending the world of tech and maybe even dethroning Apple as its king.

Sir Jonathan Paul Ive is a 58-year-old industrial designer and the brains behind the iMac, iPod, iPhone, iPad, AirPods, Apple Watch, and much more. 

Working closely with Steve Jobs, the quiet, self-effacing Brit was instrumental in taking Apple from near-bankruptcy to its position as one of the world’s most successful companies and tech’s 800-pound gorilla. Ive served as senior vice president of industrial design and later as chief design officer between 1992 and 2019, when he left Apple. Afterward, Ive set up his own design consultancy, LoveFrom, based in San Francisco. 

Now Ive has teamed up with Altman, a 40-year-old American entrepreneur and CEO of OpenAI, the Silicon Valley startup that sparked the current AI rage when it launched ChatGPT, an extremely capable and uncannily human AI, in 2022. 

Raised in St. Louis, Missouri, Altman dropped out of Stanford to launch a series of startups before becoming president of the influential accelerator Y Combinator. In 2019, he became CEO of OpenAI, and since surviving a series of boardroom dramas that saw him fired and then reinstated, he’s grown into one of the most influential voices in technology — or perhaps AI’s leading hype man, depending on your point of view.

By teaming up with Altman, Ive is once again in a position to transform the tech landscape. 

“Despite the limitations of my ability to communicate, Steve understood what I thought and how I felt.”

Jony Ive

In the six years since leaving Apple, Ive hasn’t seemed to have done much of note (not publicly, anyway). He’s worked with Airbnb, Ferrari, and King Charles III, but he hasn’t launched any world-changing products as many had hoped he would. 

This may be because Ive lost his most important working partner, Steve Jobs, to pancreatic cancer in 2011 — at Apple, they worked extremely closely, with Jobs acting as Ive’s editor and mentor. 

The two met in 1997, shortly after Jobs returned to Apple to save the company he’d co-founded 20 years earlier, which was now floundering. One of the first things Jobs did was a top-to-bottom audit of the company and its products, chopping dozens of money-losing product lines and firing thousands of people. 

The cost-cutting demoralized Ive, who was on the brink of quitting. Meanwhile, Jobs was poised to liquidate Ive’s entire industrial design team. However, before either could act, Jobs took a tour of the team’s off-campus design studio. There he discovered a wonderland of imaginative prototypes made of crazy materials that would likely never have seen the light of day under Apple’s previous regime. 

“I was … enormously intimidated, and he came to the design studio, and immediately there was a connection that was so powerful and so strong,” Ive told the BBC Radio program Desert Island Discs in February 2025. “I mean, I’d got into this terrible cycle of having to try and spend a lot of my energy on convincing people about what we should be designing and making, and I’m not very good at that. It was remarkable that, despite the limitations of my ability to communicate, Steve understood what I thought and how I felt.”

One of the prototypes was for an all-in-one computer made of translucent plastic that showed off the machine’s innards. It became the first iMac, and it looked like it landed from another planet, as Jobs noted in its introduction in 1997. The iMac was a blockbuster hit, the first in a string of knockout products dreamed up by Jobs and Ive’s team that utterly transformed Apple.

Jobs and Ive formed a productive working relationship where Ive’s team would generate a range of prototypes, and Jobs would edit them, choosing the ones he liked. This would lead to another round of prototypes and more editing until the final product slowly emerged. Lots of times they’d find themselves going down a wrong path, and they’d scrap the entire thing before starting over. Jobs expressed his frustration when this happened, but it became symbolic of their rigor and determination. Failure was an essential part of the design process.

“There is just a tremendous amount of craftsmanship in between a great idea and a great product,” Jobs told an interviewer in 1995. “And as you evolve that great idea, it changes and grows. It never comes out like it starts because you learn a lot more as you get in the subtleties of it. You also find there’s tremendous trade-offs that you have to make … and every day, you discover something new that is a new problem or a new opportunity to fit these things together a little differently.”

After Jobs died, Ive complained to Apple’s new CEO, Tim Cook, that he was tired of the day-to-day running of the ID studio. He was then kicked upstairs into the chief design officer position, which freed him up to pursue passion projects, such as the design of Apple’s circular spaceship HQ in Cupertino. Ive eventually retook control of the design studio, but his last few years at Apple were mired in controversy, with many Apple users complaining about poorly functioning products that sacrificed utility in favor of being ever thinner and lighter than their predecessors. 

It looked to many like Ive had lost his mojo after losing his critical design partner, a feeling that was only exacerbated after the failure of LoveFrom to produce anything of note. But can Altman fill Jobs’ role as Ive’s design partner? 

Ive certainly seems to think so.

“Sam is a rare visionary.”

Jony Ive

Though Altman is perhaps most famous for raising vast amounts of money, he’s no design slouch. In addition to raising more than $47 billion for OpenAI (including a $30 billion funding round with Softbank, the biggest ever), he also oversaw development of the fastest-growing app in history. Thanks to its intuitive interface, ChatGPT attracted millions of users within days of launch and grew astronomically, reaching 100 million within weeks.

The announcement of the pair’s deal was accompanied by a rather weird nine-minute-long video posted to YouTube that focused not on the explosive growth of ChatGPT, nor the magic of LLMs and generative AIs, but primarily on the bromance between Ive and Altman. 

Entitled “Sam and Jony introduce io,” the video emphasized the special bond between Ive and Altman, declaring that the alignment of their vision and values would lead to a disruptive suite of products with the potential to supplant the current crop of computers and smartphones.

The first thing Ive says in the video is in praise of Altman: “Sam is a rare visionary. He shoulders incredible responsibility, but his curiosity, his humility, remain utterly inspiring.”

The pair also declare how they are driven by a shared vision of democratizing technology and creating innovative AI-powered devices that can fundamentally change how people interact with computers. 

Their collaboration seems rooted in mutual respect, with each recognizing the other’s unique talents: Sam’s leadership at OpenAI, and Ive’s design expertise from Apple. Their partnership suggests a potential to reimagine computing through AI, driven by shared principles of creativity, curiosity, and a desire to positively impact society.

Ive has often talked about the importance of values and motivations in design and about caring about the consequences of products. In a recent talk at Stripe Sessions in San Francisco, he criticized the “move fast and break things” mindset and discussed how society should make time to talk about the consequences of what it is building, but doesn’t. 

AI, of course, is an extremely consequential technology, and Ive seems drawn to Altman’s professed caring about its impact on civilization. 

The friendship sounds key to the collaboration and to the acquisition, as well as to the future devices they are working on. But what are they building? 

Early rumors suggest an always-on necklace that sees and hears everything you do, connected to ChatGPT in the cloud. It’s not clear what the gadget does, but it may function as a capable and trustworthy AI assistant, able to book holidays or organize birthday parties on your behalf. 

Cleverly, it doesn’t try to supplant smartphones or computers, but functions as a complementary, data-gathering device. 

“In the same way that the smartphone didn’t make the laptop go away, I don’t think our first thing is going to make the smartphone go away,” Altman told the New York Times. “It is a totally new kind of thing.”

In the same interview, Ive said the partnership was driven not by money, but from a desire to build products that “benefit humanity.”

Whether the necklace proves to be that device or not, Ive seems to believe what he is doing with OpenAI will be hugely consequential, professing in the video that the OpenAI acquisition may be the most important thing that’s happened to him in decades: “I have a growing sense that everything I’ve learned over the last 30 years has led me to this place and moment.”

Leander Kahney is the editor and publisher of Cult of Mac, a daily news website that follows everything Apple. He is also the author of six books about Apple, including the New York Times bestsellers “Inside Steve’s Brain” and “Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products.”