It was in October 2023 that reports first surfaced of Apple’s former design guru, Jony Ive, teaming up with OpenAI chief Sam Altman to create what was dubbed at the time as “the iPhone of artificial intelligence.”
Earlier this year, OpenAI said it was acquiring io, a startup co-founded by Ive, in a $6.5 billion deal that finally confirmed the existence of the partnership to develop new AI-powered hardware.
In May, Altman said he’d already seen Ive’s design for the product, describing it as “the coolest piece of technology that the world will have ever seen.”
But the device is still hidden away.
A target launch date has been set for next year, but a report by the Financial Times (FT) over the weekend suggested that it faces a delay as the team attempts to overcome a number of technical issues.
The much-anticipated product will be “a palm-sized device without a screen that can take audio and visual cues from the physical environment and respond to users’ requests,” according to the FT, which has spoken to people with knowledge of the project. It’s also been described by an insider as “roughly the size of a smartphone that users would communicate with through a camera, microphone, and speaker.”
But the report added that the team is having issues with the device’s “software and the infrastructure needed to power it.”
For example, It’s currently trying to agree on the personality of the device’s AI assistant, while also addressing privacy issues.
A source told the FT that “compute is another huge factor for the delay,” referring to the computing power and infrastructure necessary to run the advanced AI models that the device will depend on. “Amazon has the compute for an Alexa, so does Google [for its Home device], but OpenAI is struggling to get enough compute for ChatGPT, let alone an AI device. They need to fix that first.”
It wouldn’t be unusual for an all-new device to face delays, and no doubt Ive and Altman have at the forefront of their minds the disastrous launch suffered by Humane’s AI Pin.
The AI Pin was a highly anticipated AI-powered wearable device released in April 2024. It was marketed as a revolutionary smartphone replacement but failed spectacularly due to a slew of issues that included poor product design, slow and unreliable AI responses, short battery life, and a high price of $699 plus additional subscription costs.
The device was discontinued in February this year and the company sold its key assets to HP for $116 million.
Did you think hitting delete on your AI chatbot conversation actually makes it disappear? Georgia Tech researchers just proved that's not entirely true. They have built a forensic tool called ORISA that can dig deleted conversations from your phone and even rebuild them into a working chatbot session you can keep talking to.
How can ORISA bring deleted AI conversations back?
Touchscreen laptops have been around for years. You can get them in all sizes and shapes. Just not from Apple. For years, the Cupertino giant has treated the idea of a touchscreen MacBook the way I treat a meeting that could have been an email: with open contempt. However, Wednesday looks like the day the company could finally change its mind.
The latest Apple invite puts the “Pro and Tell” showcase in Los Angeles at 10 a.m. PT (1 p.m. ET) on October 28, 2026. Instead of a regular live-streamed keynote, it is an invitation-only, hands-on event for a handful of press and creators (similar to what the company did for the MacBook Neo earlier this year).
Two residents of Chicago have filed a lawsuit in the US over claims that robots run by Coco Robotics and Serve Robotics captured their facial and hand measurements without consent, bringing renewed attention to the food delivery robots. The cases raise a troubling question: If a robot delivers food to your door, can it also be gathering sensitive information about you?
According to a report by The Associated Press, the proposed class-action lawsuits were filed in Cook County on Oct. 9 and allege violations of Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act. The complaints claim that the robots’ cameras and LiDAR sensors captured information on customers’ faces and hands as they approached the machines to pick up their orders. Both have denied the allegations.