Hacker News Reader

Comment by gnopgnip | Hacker News Reader

From the article 5 billion of the payment is equity in OpenAI. So they aren't spending cash

This still means 1.5B were paid in cash for a company from what I understood has neither clients nor even a product. Not exactly pocket money.

Appears from the outside as a very expensive aquihire but if you're getting the guy who essentially created the iPhone it could be worth it.

But they're not getting him. Jony isn't included in the deal.

He has $5B reasons to help them though.

They are according to WSJ:

> Jony Ive, a chief architect of the iPhone, and his design firm are taking over creative and design control at OpenAI, where they will develop consumer devices and other projects that will shape the future look and feel of AI.

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/former-apple-design-guru-jony-iv...

The Verge says otherwise

> Ive won’t be joining OpenAI, and his design firm, LoveFrom, will continue to be independent, but they will “take over design for all of OpenAI, including its software,” in a deal valued at nearly $6.5 billion

https://www.theverge.com/news/671838/openai-jony-ive-ai-hard...

“Including its software…”

That’s a remarkably big product scope to own!

Are we talking about Devex workflows from docs on getting fed through Ive’s group?

The Verge must have this wrong, it doesn’t make sense and I don’t think Ive would be interested in maintaining design on ChatGPT’s web client.

Besides, only Anthropic beats the UX of ChatGPT. It would seem like a mistake to dismiss the authority of the folks who have built that product up.

Ive is a good designer sure but "essentially created the iPhone" is absurd. It took thousands of engineers and product visionaries to bring that device together, and OpenAI isn't getting any of that. You aren't going to replicate its success by hiring the guy whose major contribution was insisisting that all Apple products be a few millimeters thinner in every iteration.

Lots of companies were making smart phones with similar specs. Under Johnny Ive's management, the Apple version made a much bigger splash than any of them and defined the category.

Arguably HP/Palm's WebOS devices were ahead on every mark - easier to use, more featureful, smarter, better physical design than any iPhone of similar manufacturing date.

The difference was management choosing to stick with a platform for long enough for network effects to kick in.

If Apple has any advantages compared to other big tech, it's an ability to look past next quarter's financials.

Palm offerings in 2007, such as the Treo 755p or the Centro, could not compete hardware-wise with the original iPhone. The claim that these Palm phones were "easier to use" is hilarious to me, and probably hilarious to many others.

I explicitly mentioned WebOS, meaning the devices released around 2009, which competed with 1st gen iPhone old stock, and directly against iPhone 3G - the second generation.

The first gen iPhone is not a smartphone by today's standards. No multitasking, no copy/paste, no centralized instant messaging, all things WebOS devices had on release.

Even the second generation of iPhones felt half baked by comparison.

Which just goes to illustrate my point, that they weren't technologically superior, just more committed.

The race was already over by the time webOS showed up. Even Microsoft, with a superior product and many billions spent pushing it, couldn't overcome the network effects of iOS and Android. No one else had a chance.

Disagree strongly. Your definition of failure seems to be "not achieving market monopoly" which doesn't make any sense to me.

Both Microsoft phones and WebOS have surviving communities today, and would have thriving communities if new devices were available.

Sadly, it takes more than two consecutive quarters to establish a platform.

My definition for success is - do they still exist

Comcast and AT&T still exist. Kraft still turns out war rations by the warehouse. Tasteless grocery store tomatoes are still the most widely available.

This metric has very little to do with quality.

Those are horrible examples. The product lines you are discussing do not exist in any meaningful sense of the term.

LuneOS - the direct continuation of WebOS development had a release in Feb 2024 and is still under active development: https://webos-ports.org/wiki/Main_Page

Pretty good for something that supposedly failed 12 years ago.

> Under Johnny Ive's management

You spelled Steve Jobs wrong.

At the time of the public debut of the first generation iPhone (January 2007), the statement "lots of companies were making smart phones with similar specs" is objectively false. Further, there were zero companies making comparable large touchscreen, large cpu phones outside of Apple at the time.

You're 100% right and in my opinion there is a much higher probability this is a total waste and nothing of similar value will be created. But if you're OpenAI and you have this option I also see why you may take it.

The book 'The One Device' covers this in really thorough detail.

Completely agree. He is a good designer, but graphical UX went downhill when he was given more control at Apple and he became increasingly militant about hardware design to the point that the MacBook Pro was kinda bad because it was unreasonably thermal limited and had a terrible keyboard.

Kinda bad is quite the understatement.

Ive is basically the best in the business if your needs are to get a large amount of cutting-edge technology into a ridiculously constrained form factor and have it look good, feel solid, and be manufacturable at scale.

That is what he is world-class at. Not designing comprehensive product experiences or ideating new greenfield products (and definitely not designing app icons).

If IO or OpenAI also has a product visionary of the caliber to fully utilize Ive's singular industrial design talent, they'll rule the world. Otherwise, they're sinking billions into the next Humane Pin.

I don’t think there’s any evidence that Ive has the expertise you claim. He was lead designer for Apple when they did the iPhone, but it is Apple who has the extensive deep expertise in hardware design and engineering.

Ive spent months in China working on the iPhone assembly. Plenty of evidence.

The team on the iPhone was surprisingly small. Not small by startup standards, but nothing like as big as many would imagine.

It kind of is, when they were given $500B and told to make a return in 10-ish years. They have to put the capital in play where it has the largest ROI potential. They are gambling that Jony has another iPhone in him.

I don't know enough about any of this to weigh in on it, but when you take investor money, you aren't supposed to sit on it or do slow burn (at least not VC money), its meant to be gasoline, and you moonshot with it.

> They are gambling that Jony has another iPhone in him.

I seriously doubt it.

If anything because Apple let him go exactly when they were looking for a new hit product like the iPhone.

But also because how he handled the Mac the years before he was fired. All his big decisions were just bad. The butterfly keyboard, touchbar, USB-C only ports, etc. Heck even the 2013 Mac Pro (the trashcan) was an engineering failure. They could never upgrade it because, according to Craig Federighi, they got themselves into a thermal corner caused by the design of it[1].

[1] https://daringfireball.net/2017/04/the_mac_pro_lives

The greatest home run hitters of all time average < 30% hit rate (not 30% of hits are home runs, but 30% of swings are even hits).

Sometimes you gotta swing for that fence regardless of the outcome.

But even those best home run hitters reach a point where the hit rate drops way below average...

since we're torturing the analogy... you don't measure a baseball team's success by the # of HR's one player records in a season, you talk championships over time. Sometimes they're related, but less frequently than you'd think.

That analogy breaks down almost immediately. I get your point that when you go out and try to do things sometimes you will fail, but the problem is that many of his design failures were seen _even at the time_ to be failures.

I don't necessarily think Ive is going to succeed, but if you're going to make a lot of bets, taking one bet on someone who succeeded before seems pretty reasonable. He wouldn't be the first person to rise to great heights, fall, and rise again, even in the Apple world.

I absolutely agree right up until we start talking about price. Obviously this deal was all in stock from someone who has a history creative corporate control structures, but nevertheless the on paper cost of was $6.4 billion. That's a hell of a bet.

This whole thread seems weird to me. There's no way on Earth this is to acquire talent, let alone one person alone.

For this price, I'd figure something already exists.

Sam did say he took one of the prototypes home and he thought it was "the coolest piece of technology the world will have ever seen"

A good batter knows when the pitch is bad and you take the balls and get a walk.

I hate sports analogies, because they're arbitrary

A good QB will complete 65% of his passes

A good goaltender will stop 90% of shots

A good bowler will get a strike 95% of the time

This gave me an idea: a Slack AI that will give me an analogy to support my point, whatever it may be.

“Hey Analogai, help me out here.”

“Ah I see what Chip Frumpkins, Director of Looking Relevant is saying. It’s basically that we need to throw a lot of paint at the wall to see what sticks. And if we fail, at least we’ve got a Jackson Pollock.”

Baseball is the hardest sport, but it’s a zero sum game. The .300 batting average is against equally elite pitching. Engineering or design is about adding value.

Taking the raw engineering of the components and interfaces that defined the iPhone and making a system of it is design at its peak and almost art.

Taking a proven form factor like a laptop, not talking to users and making it worse is just a misstep. It wasn’t a complete disaster only because the bar is so low, the defective Apple laptop is still the best laptop in the market.

As one of the fervent 500 million daily GPT users it’s a no brainer for Open AI to create a personal mobile AI device or an AI phone with GPT accessible right from your Lock Screen.

It could…

- interface with AI Agents( businesses, friends & family’s agents, etc) to get things done & used as a knowledgeable.

Once u pick up the device it’s like a FaceTime call with your AI agent/friend in which u can skin to look however u want (a deceased loved one ..tho that might be too out there).

- It visually surfs the Web with you.. making u not open a web browser as much

- take the best selfies of u…gets you to the best lighting.

Overall excited to see their vision and leave/drop Apple’s now boring iPhone for a GPT phone or personal mobile AI device. I think a phone form factor would be best, but we’ll see.

And you seriously think Ive could be responsible for leading this effort?

You & just a dude here with ideas that in time go nowhere or maybe somewhere. Altman noted different demographics use GPT differently with 18 to 20 somethings not making decisions without consulting GPT (could be marketing speak but with some truth).

how is this related to Ive being competent or not?

Obviously the plan is to bring back Jobs 2.0 AI Edition as a conversational agent and personal coach.

Apple certainly aren't going to do it, so who better than Ive?

How did that work for the Facebook phone? And all their billions of fervent Facebook users?

Google own this space - pixel phones already do pretty much all of this, and they have the best models and the most users too. No built in agentic capabilities yet, but I am sure that is just a month or two away (see project mariner).

If you've not tried the pixel photo ai features already, you may be surprised. Things like changing lighting, removing people from the shot, auto-stitching people into a group photo, composites group photos so you get one photo where everyone is smiling and looking at the camera at the same time even if that never happened etc, text-editing photos etc. Gemini live is like a facetime call without the 3d avatar but we've seen they can do it with Veo3 already if they wanted.

This is all reality today already in the hands of billions of Google users, so OpenAI have a bit of a hill to climb: OpenAI would need to not only catch up with Google (both in AI space which they seem incapable of doing right now but also in product too) and surpass them.

Google are totally integrated in this space - the device, the software, the AI models, the infrastructure, the data, the sites/apps people use (search, Gmail, maps, YouTube, docs, ...) and also the billions of users.

I doubt OpenAI can really make a dent here. I suspect any OpenAI-Phone will be quietly discontinued like the Facebook phone

Maybe time will tell ..myself never to excited about a Facebook phone but I am a big Meta Ray Ban wearer/user.

Not sure smart glasses will be big but I lean on indeed they will be just not replace our pocket mobile devices (can’t take selfies with glasses).

Had Google not stopped producing and iterating on Google Glass, we would have HUDs in our eyeglass frames, that would be useful.

I'm shocked that nobody has reproduced Google Glass. It was great even back then and it didn't take much to understand its usefulness.

No company that I am aware of has produced anything like it since

They stopped the glasses with tiny fov that weren't useful, but they have all (FB, Apple, Google, multiple startups like North, Xreal) been working on more subtle glasses continuously since then, it's just been hard and have needed display/power breakthroughs. Google announced new glasses again yesterday. Looks promising but live demo sputtered out at the end, still not gonna be ready for a while

Meta Ray Bans for sunglasses wearer who takes pics & videos using their phone are very handy; no need to take out or even have your phone to do either. Can also ask it for the time without needing your phone too.

What I was describing is basically H.E.R. the movie on your GPT phone or personal mobile AI device (a hologram.. maybe they are going for). To me it's a new paradigm driven by AI as your friend/assistant unlike Facebook making a social network phone. As well to me GPT feels like how Twitter and Google felt when they started to slowly change the world in their own ways. Do you use GPT frequently throughout your day?

You pick up your GPT mobile device and the UX is a FaceTime call with a real life looking AI person who does everything for you(you can skin it to look like anyone including a deceased relative.. they live on & help you thru life). You rarely will need to go to the web ... your AI friend / agent / assistant could bring up the web right within the FaceTime call yet visual the data you seek. They can take the best selfies of you ... direct to the best lighting within your living space at the time. As noted your AI friend will interface with AI Agents of businesses, your friends & family to schedule things and used as a knowledge base (want to know your cousin birthday ask your agent and if you cousin shares that with family members your agent will tell you via their agent).

You are saying Google just announced a H.E.R. phone or personal AI mobile device where the AI is the focus (apps and the web take a backseat)? As Im describing above?

The trash can was a bet on external GPU enclosures, which are technically feasible but just never took off in the marketplace. It was great engineering for a use case that just didn’t pan out.

Apple never really wanted to support eGPU. That's why the marketplace never took off.

Yes they did, they redesigned an entire very expensive product category around them.

He transformed the MacBook Pro into its pure essence, the ultimate form, meant to be used on a slab of polished granite in a HEPA filtered room, with only a precisely aligned array of dongles to offset the clean vision.

The fact the you took your laptop out in the field or to a couch in some barn like a filthy animal, corrupting perfection with dust and grease, rendering the keyboard useless is on you. It is a reflection of your own animal nature.

Every Macbook user I've seen seems to have an ultra smudged fingerprint screen as if they were using an iPad with so many layers of oil it shimmers as a rainbow, with sprinkles with various unique flakes of dandruff, and dirt encrusted on their trackpad and keyboard. It stirs up conniptions.

USB-C only ports were good though?

Spot on about the rest, though.

I still chuckle when I see a new laptop with USB-A ports

You know, when we upgraded to USB-C I thought they were mostly nifty. Reversible, quite universal, fully embraced by everyone.

But over 7 years of using them, I've come to resent some of their differences with past USB connectors. Very small, insecure friction grip, reversible, more delicate.

Also it seems that device designers think that a newer generation of USB needs fewer ports? My Lenovo ThinkPad had 2x USB-A and 2x USB-C in 2018. Now I've got a Pixel with 1x USB-C and a Chromebook with 1x USB-A and 2x USB-C; on each of those devices you need one port for charging. So if USB is more versatile and compatible than ever, why am I not allowed to plug in all my stuff at once?

> They are gambling that Jony has another iPhone in him

All they have to do is convince investors of that before the next round and they get a net return on him.

The iPhone's value comes from its software ecosystem and camera/SoC hardware, which Ive had zero involvement with.

The first iPhone was a hardware engineering marvel, it was leaps and bounds more premium than any phone in that generation. It took other companies years to catch up.

I'd add those 2G > 3G > 3GS > 4 > 4s were iteration marvels to witness.

But you're not asserting that Ive was involved in that either, right?

I’m unsure what he’s trying to say either. The gibberish and out-of-context replies ITT are making me think HN, like many other sites, is laden with bots now.

Jony Ive never had even the iPhone in him. He is an excellent designer. He was never a product person.

> an excellent designer. He was never a product person.

It's like an excellent captain who never was a mariner, some useless theoretical excellence.

> when they were given $500B

You're off by an order of magnitude here.

How much credit does he really deserve for the iPhone? Jobs and Fadell were obviously both involved in the iPhone too and Nest has some pretty appealing design without Jony being involved at all.

Source? They did a $40B funding round for which Softbank is on the hook for most of it, and they are going into debt cause they don't have the cash either [0]. IMO, these acquisitions are due to the fact they know just selling the model isn't where the huge margins are, selling the verticals is.

[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-05-21/softbank-...

They previously invested and already owned 23% of the company. So no cash for this Aquisition

> OpenAI already owns a 23% stake in io as part of a deal from last year, meaning it needs about $5 billion for the acquisition, the Times reported, citing unnamed people familiar with the matter.

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/heres-why-openai-is-buying...

They already have a product, 500m+ active users, and billions in revenue. They aren't remotely profitable, but that is a different conversation.

You misunderstood.

My bad. I inserted "by" instead of "for". I see your point!

From the article: “all-stock deal”

“As part of the deal, OpenAI is paying $5 billion in equity for io. The balance of the nearly $6.5 billion stems from a partnership reached in the fourth quarter of last year that involved OpenAI acquiring a 23% stake in io.”

Honestly I think it's a great move if you know you have a hyped up valuation, to exchange that paper valuation for actual company acquisitions. Not every company has that ability.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com