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Comment by brentm | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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