LIFESTYLE

IN THE 1967 FILM THE GRADUATE, that single word is the whole of a young Benjamin Braddock’ s future, the one piece of career advice an older guest presses on him at a party. Get into plastics, the man means, and you will never want for anything. Restage it in 2026. The party becomes a North Beach café, the cocktails two espressos, and the pair at the table are Sam Altman, who runs ChatGPT maker OpenAI, and Jony Ive, the British designer behind the iPhone. The one-word future has changed. It is design now, and Altman has just paid US $ 6.5bn for the man across the table. That purchase of Jony’ s hardware start-up io, made last year, was the most expensive acquisition of a design team in history, and OpenAI’ s first real move into hardware. It has since set every big technology company chasing the same prize: the first device since the iPhone worth reorganising your life around. Sam has told staff it is a“ chance to do the biggest thing we’ ve ever done as a company”, imagining 100 million such devices on desks beside the laptop and the phone. The odd part is the race is not being run on microchips or the AI models themselves, which are fast converging into sameness, but on design, the one edge a rival cannot simply buy or copy.

The gospel of care When OpenAI bought io, it acquired the nucleus of the team behind the iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch, then folded them into a 400-strong hardware group. Their home is a red-brick building in Jackson Square, a short walk from the design shops of San Francisco’ s oldest neighbourhood. To understand why a software company would pay that, you have to understand what Jony sells, which is not drawing but conviction. At LoveFrom, the studio he runs alongside the OpenAI work, the name is the whole philosophy, lifted from a remark of Steve Jobs about making things with care. The 50-odd staff write one another thank-you notes and hand-make gifts. For Ferrari’ s first electric car they spent months on research and produced four fat books on subjects as narrow as“ speed” before a line was drawn. This is design as monastic practice, nearer to Dieter Rams’ s“ less, but better” than to any Silicon Valley sprint.“ It’ s very easy to be different, but very difficult to be better,” Jony once told his biographer Leander Kahney. Those who know him describe an almost punishing focus.“ He’ s that kind of designer,” says Clive Grinyer, who worked alongside Jony at the London firm Tangerine before Apple and now teaches service design at the Royal College of Art.

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