Can a $6.5 billion 'me' dethrone Apple?

A few days ago, OpenAI invested $6.5 billion in 'io', a company set up to create 'gizmos' based on artificial intelligence. The amount is large in itself, slightly lower than what it would take to buy Pirelli, Fincantieri, TIM or a third of Leonardo or Mediobanca, but the interesting thing is that 'io' still has neither a customer nor a marketable product: its founder showed a prototype to Sam Altman, founder of OpenAi, and that was enough. It should be added that the founder is Jony Ive, Steve Jobs' legendary designer, creator of the iPhone and the Apple Watch, and that in 'io' there are many designers and engineers who have contributed to Apple's success.

As the news spread, many began to consider Apple doomed: already lagging behind with AI applications (for those in doubt, try Siri), stuck in the dilemma of innovating such an iconic and cash-flow-generating product as the iPhone, and, to make matters worse, unable to run factories themselves and under pressure in the new world of tariff walls.

Altman and Ive's vision is as simple as it is futuristic: to think of a 'contraption' that is with us all the time, that we can interact with without a screen (at least initially) and that works with the power of artificial intelligence. After all, since the birth of computers, we have all had to write on a screen to be able to interact, create codes, produce documents; an enormous limitation to the many ways that humans have to think, create, do. The most natural way is with speech and, at most, with images: writing is a sophisticated communication code but only one of the ways to express ourselves. Altman and Ive's goal is to sell 100 million (!) 'gizmos' that will not be phones or glasses, but something completely new, that will be integrated into our lives with a fluid and intuitive interaction like the MacBook or the iPhone. In short, the end of scrolling.

familyandtrends wrote in October 2024 a book on artificial intelligence by posing a simple question: AI, like all technologies, to be useful must do something for which a consumer is willing to pay more than the cost incurred to produce it.

Apple does for us a job for which we are willing to pay (a lot): it makes technology available in a user-friendly way. It has been doing this since the days when its co-founder, Steve Wozniak (Voz), used to help the super software experts and bright students from Standford who met at the Homebrew Computer Club to build their own personal computers. In Voz's words, 'very few could actually build it (the personal computer), they were super software and programming experts, but they had no idea how to solder a motherboard'. Apple's early PCs were built to make a programmable object available to software enthusiasts. That is why design has always been important to Apple, not because it is elegant, but because it makes it easy to use by integrating hardware and software. The click wheel on the iPod that also shaped the Cupertino office became iconic not because it was elegant but because it made it easy to enjoy music. Apple has never exploited frontier technologies, it has always waited for them to spread and become stable, at which point it integrated them and brought them easily to the consumer.