LIFESTYLE
“ He will be laser-focused, so he basically hasn’ t got time for anything else.” There is penance in it, too. Clive, who has known him for decades, thinks the smartphone weighs on Jony.
“ I think he feels some responsibility for what happened with the iPhone,” he says.“ It became a gateway to this terrible world.” The man who designed the object that colonised our attention is now, at 59, being paid a fortune to design its successor, something“ less distracting”, in Sam’ s words. There is something of Robert Oppenheimer in it. The next device is already out there, the way the bomb was before Los Alamos, waiting for a hand to call it into being, and Jony has decided the hand should be his, guilt and all, because the thing is coming either way and he would rather it arrive beautiful.
What comes after the glass slab OpenAI’ s own entry, according to leaks, is screenless, a palm-sized companion, worn or set on a desk, that listens, watches and, in one report, moves, with small mechanical gestures meant to feel almost alive. Sam calls the early prototypes“ simple”.“ You trust it over time,” he said on stage beside Jony,“ and it does have just this incredible contextual awareness of your whole life.” It is not the only one chasing what comes after the phone. Meta has stopped waiting for the perfect object and started shipping the good-enough one.
116 September 2026