OpenAI and Jony Ive Are Building the Future While Apple Keeps Doodling With Emojis

If this is the beginning of the end for Apple, then this might be the quote that sums it all up – when people look back on the 2020s AI boom: “While they feuded with a gaming company over in-app purchases and made false promises about ‘Apple Intelligence,’ the rest of the world innovated.”

This week, OpenAI announced it’s acquiring Jony Ive’s AI hardware startup io in a $6.5 billion all-stock deal. Not a partnership. Not a quiet design consultancy. An outright acquisition. A new division within OpenAI. And Jony Ive, the man who designed the iPhone, the MacBook Air, and pretty much every major Apple device of the past two decades, is now building hardware for a new AI future – one that may not even include Apple.

You can’t help but feel the ground shift beneath your feet.

The Anti-iPhone Era?

What Ive and OpenAI are cooking up is not a smartphone. Sam Altman says it will be a “truly novel product.” Something that needs to exist for AI to truly shine. A new form factor. And if it works, it may change how we interact with computers the same way the iPhone did in 2007.

Instead, Apple is in court.

The company is facing lawsuits for allegedly misleading customers about what Apple Intelligence could do – with people buying the iPhone 16 expecting magic, only to receive a handful of barely-functional features months later. The Genmoji features (animated emojis based on prompts) did arrive – but for many, they feel like a parody. One tweet nailed the mood: “Apple AI – I can generate a poop emoji with a hat. Google AI – I can generate a whole movie with dialogue, music, and sound effects and you won’t even be able to tell that it’s AI.”

The gap in innovation is no longer subtle.

A Timeline of Missed Shots

A lot has now come out about what’s really happening inside Apple. According to Bloomberg, PCMag, and several internal reports:

• Apple’s AI efforts only accelerated after being shocked by ChatGPT.
• Craig Federighi started using ChatGPT personally and was reportedly floored.
• Siri’s new AI layer was rushed. A Frankenstein mix of old and new code.
• WWDC demos? Faked or heavily prototyped.
• Ads for iPhone 16 showed features that didn’t exist yet.

The best summary for all this mess is this video by Snazzy Labs.

Eventually, things fell apart. Internally, Apple’s own software boss tried running the new Siri on his iPhone and realized it wasn’t working. Updates were delayed. Features pulled. Executives shuffled. Lawsuits filed.

Even on the hardware front, Apple’s not as far ahead as it once was. Xiaomi just announced its own 3-nanometer chip – the XRing O1 – with 19 billion transistors and benchmark scores rivaling Apple’s A18 and Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite. It’s a bold move in China’s self-sufficiency push, and a reminder that Apple’s silicon dominance isn’t unchallenged either

Meanwhile at Google I/O

Just 24 hours before the OpenAI-Jony Ive news, Google hosted its most AI-heavy event ever. The announcements were wild:

• Gemini is now everywhere – from Chrome to Gmail, Search, and Android – mostly still for the U.S. market.
• AI Mode in Google Search is basically an integrated chatbot – I hate it.
• Google’s Android XR is getting good and fun.
• Their video generation model, Flow, can now create entire scenes with audio included.
• Project Astra is a universal AI assistant prototype that doesn’t wait for commands — it watches, listens, thinks.

If Apple’s AI feels cautious, Google’s AI feels unhinged – and that’s a compliment. Like I said last year, they’re throwing everything at the wall, and it’s, seemingly, sticking.

So, what’s happening next?

I don’t know if Apple is doomed. It’s still sitting on one of the largest cash reserves in corporate history. It still makes the most polished devices on earth. It still sells. (People are even arguing online that Apple could wake up and buy OpenAI all cash).

But these are the same things people said about Nokia. And BlackBerry. And Intel before the 10nm chip delays. Sometimes, dominance doesn’t disappear overnight. It just slowly gets eaten by bolder companies taking bigger bets. One tweet asked: “Did Apple become so arrogant and proud that they let the competition get ahead?”

Maybe.

This isn’t a declaration that Apple is finished. But it’s definitely a picture worth pausing to look at. A designer who helped make Apple what it is, now working with the CEO of the biggest AI company right now. Lawsuits from customers. Internal panic. Broken promises. Emoji generators.

It’s wild.

But Yes, Maybe This Is All a Bubble

It’s a bubble, yes! Just like the dot-com bubble. Just like the crypto bubble. Just like the electric vehicle bubble. And just like those, it’s going to burst and rise and burst again. Money is being thrown left and right, the promises are wild, and the demos are… weird.

But if history tells us anything, it’s this: bubbles create winners. The internet bubble gave us Amazon and Google. The EV craze has given us BYD. The AI wave will leave someone standing on top – possibly OpenAI, possibly Google, most probably China, maybe someone we haven’t even seen yet. And right now? It’s not looking like it will be Apple.

Let’s see what they do at WWDC in a few weeks. Maybe it all turns around. Maybe there’s still one more thing!

But if this is the beginning of the end – well, this is how it started.