LIFESTYLE
I think he feels some responsibility for what happened with the iPhone. It became a gateway to this terrible world
Clive Grinyer Who worked alongside Jony at the London firm Tangerine before Apple and now teaches service design at the Royal College of Art
A device that records your living room asks for a faith that OpenAI, whose CEO was once briefly sacked for not being“ consistently candid”, may struggle to earn. Beauty is necessary. It has never been sufficient. That is what makes the coming months the most interesting design has been in two decades. The device is finished, OpenAI says, with an unveiling teased before the year is out. If it lands, the man who taught a generation to stare at glass will have built the thing that finally lets them look up. If it does not, it joins the pin and the orange box in the drawer of noble failures. Either way, the moat is no longer the model or the chip, both of which the competition can rent by the hour. It is taste, and taste, as OpenAI has shown with a US $ 6.5bn cheque, is the one thing you cannot download. Plastics, it turns out, was only ever half the advice. The other half was knowing what to make of them.
122 September 2026