Sir Jony Ive helped craft products that defined eras, including the iMac, the iPod and the iPhone - David Paul Morris/Bloomberg

“If I had a spiritual partner at Apple, it’s Jony,” the late Steve Jobs said of Sir Jony Ive, the British designer. Together, the pair changed the way billions of people interact with technology, with the launch of the iPhone almost two decades ago. Jobs was the visionary leader and inventor. Ive finessed the look and feel – the aura – that made Apple’s products so sought-after.

Now, six years after leaving Apple and more than a decade after Jobs’s death, Ive is making a remarkable return to Silicon Valley’s bleeding edge with a new collaborator – Sam Altman.

The Essex-born design expert will work with OpenAI and its founder Altman to develop a new range of consumer gadgets that can augment, and perhaps one day replace, the iPhone he helped make inescapable. OpenAI has announced a deal to subsume IO, a start-up founded by Ive, in an all-share deal with an eye-catching $6.5bn (£4.9bn) price.

Ive will be a consultant, not a full employee. IO’s staff, made up of world-leading designers, engineers and creatives, will join OpenAI.Apple’s former chief designer Sir Jony Ive has joined OpenAI’s Sam Altman in a $6.5bn deal

The new partners plan to “completely reimagine what it means to use a computer”, Altman says, using OpenAI’s artificial intelligence, ChatGPT. Details are scarce on what their products will ultimately look like, but Altman told staff he and Ive intended to build millions of artificial intelligence (AI) “companions”. It is not expected to be a phone or have a screen.

If Ive is to be believed, his next act could be more transformational than his long stint in Cupertino. “Everything I have learnt over the last 30 years has led me to this place and to this moment,” Ive said when announcing the deal.

If he is right, then the partnership could prove transformational – not just for OpenAI but for society as a whole.

‘A spiritual thing’

In his decades at Apple, Ive helped craft products that defined eras, including the iMac, the iPod and the iPhone. After studying industrial design at Newcastle, he moved to Silicon Valley in the early 1990s.

Working with Jobs, he turned a failing Apple into the multitrillion-dollar giant it is today. Ive was involved in everything from high-level concepts such as Apple’s electric car work to designing its packaging and cables.

“When somebody unwrapped that box and took out that cable, they thought, ‘Somebody gave a s--- about me.’ That’s a spiritual thing,” he said at a recent event.

While press-shy and describing himself as “anxious”, Ive was widely viewed as the second most important executive at Apple. After Jobs’s death, some saw him as the most important. “He works directly for me,” Jobs had told his biographer, Walter Isaacson. “He has more operational power than anyone else at Apple except me.”

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Ive left Apple in 2019 after close to three decades. His design consultancy, LoveFrom, has since worked with clients including Ferrari, and on the King’s Coronation.

His latter years at Apple reportedly left the designer burnt out and increasingly disillusioned with the behemoth’s culture. Speaking at a recent event, he criticised Silicon Valley’s “corporate agendas” of “money and power”, which had replaced a more idealistic goal of “trying to move things forward ... creating something better”, although without directly criticising Apple.Working with Steve Jobs, Sir Jony Ive turned a failing Apple into the multitrillion-dollar giant it is today - Richard Lewisohn/Alamy

In Altman, like Jobs, Ive says he has found someone who aligns with his world-view. “One of the reasons Sam and I clicked, despite our wonderfully different journeys to this point, our motivations and values are completely the same,” he said.

While Ive helped to create the modern consumer technology in billions of pockets around the world, he now believes its time has come. These products are “decades old ... It is just common sense to at least think there is something beyond these legacy products”, he said in a video announcing the deal.

‘A family of devices’

While phones have helped connect billions in new ways, Ive said at one recent event that the “unintended consequences” of his inventions “weighs on me ... heavily”.

Shares in Apple dropped 2pc on the news that OpenAI had acquired IO, a team of about 60 staff, largely ex-Apple, that Ive had built up to work on new designs and technology.

Just what he will work on with OpenAI remains a mystery, although a device is promised for 2026. The Wall Street Journal reported OpenAI hopes to sell 100m AI devices that can work alongside a laptop or smartphone, sitting in a person’s pocket or on their desk. Altman has suggested these could form part of a subscription to ChatGPT.

This first gadget could be a small “pod” that is likely to augment, rather than replace, the iPhone, The Telegraph understands. Other smart gadgets could ultimately follow, with Altman promising a “family of devices”.

The vision will spark comparisons to the 2013 science fiction film Her, of which Altman is known to be a fan, in which Joaquin Phoenix falls in love with an AI chatbot and interacts with it through a phone-like handset.Jony Ive’s vision will spark comparisons to the 2013 science fiction film Her, of which Altman is known to be a fan - Cinematic / Alamy Stock Photo

The deal will stoke fears that Apple is missing out on the race to develop AI, after its Apple Intelligence product received mixed reviews.

But there will also be plenty of questions as to whether Ive and OpenAI, which has never launched a piece of hardware, can succeed where others have failed.

Humane, a start-up founded by ex-Apple engineers, tried and failed to sell an AI “pin”, a voice-activated badge featuring a projector screen. It was sold to HP and largely shut down. The Rabbit r1, a similar pocket-sized AI puck, was met with dismal reviews. In an interview with Bloomberg, Ive dismissed these early efforts as “very poor products”.

Seeing into the future

Meanwhile, Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta has been pushing AI-powered glasses, which will one-day incorporate augmented reality, as a vehicle to hook consumers on its Meta AI chatbot.

“Mark Zuckerberg is betting on glasses as the best form factor for delivering AI,” says Ben Wood, a technology analyst at CCS Insight.Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta has been pushing AI-powered glasses - David Paul Morris/Bloomberg

However, as with other tech-enabled glasses, including Apple’s Vision Pro, take-up has been limited. Wood says it is “unsurprising that there is scepticism about this type of product” given the recent failures of rivals. However, he adds that Ive and Altman’s plans hint at a “very different approach” to that of Meta.

The unusual structure of OpenAI and Ive’s deal has drawn scrutiny from analysts. Richard Windsor, an independent technology analyst, described Ive as “the most expensive consultant in history”. Such an arrangement risks making it “much easier for him to disappear should the relationship sour”. Many will view the valuation OpenAI ascribed to IO as another sign of an AI bubble.

In March, OpenAI raised $40bn. It has pledged to build AI superintelligence and huge data centres across the world. While it is now valued at $300bn, it is presently burning through billions of dollars on these projects. Rather than pull back, Altman is doubling down on spending with his new ambition to build a successor the iPhone.

Many others have tried and failed. Nothing has made the same splash – or sold in the same numbers – as the iPhone since it was launched in 2007. But, says Wood, “It would be foolish to bet against Jony Ive.”

“Jony did the iPhone, Jony did the MacBook Pro,” Altman said in OpenAI’s launch video. “These are the defining ways people use technology.”

With any luck, the Briton will design the defining way of using what Silicon Valley believes is the next great technology to sweep the world: AI.

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