For more than a decade, Silicon Valley has been trying to convince us that the next big thing would be something you wear. The pitch was always slick: computers so seamlessly integrated into our lives that we’d barely notice them, devices that would augment reality and make us all cyborgs.
The reality has been a parade of expensive — or worse, deeply uncool — disappointments.
Google (GOOGL) Glass promised to put the internet directly in our field of vision, only to become a punchline about privacy invasion and social awkwardness. Microsoft’s (MSFT) HoloLens wowed in controlled demos but never escaped conference rooms. Samsung’s Galaxy Gear smartwatch arrived with great fanfare in 2013, then disappeared into obscurity.
The most recent casualties in the wearable wars were supposed to herald the AI hardware revolution. Humane’s AI Pin, a $700 lapel device that promised to replace your smartphone, launched to widespread criticism before the company was acquired and shut down entirely. Rabbit’s R1, an orange square that cost $200 and claimed to be an AI assistant you could hold, quickly revealed itself as a glorified voice recorder.
Despite this graveyard of consumer technology startups, Jony Ive — the designer behind the iPhone, iPad, and a couple of the wearables that actually worked — announced this time will be different. OpenAI is acquiring io, his hardware company, for $6.5 billion. The deal brings together the company that made AI conversational with the designer who could finally give ChatGPT a physical form.
If anyone has earned the right to deliver harsh verdicts on consumer hardware, it’s Jony Ive. The former Apple (AAPL) design chief has a track record of brutal honesty about products that don’t meet his standards, famously pushing his teams through countless iterations until they achieved his vision of perfection.
So when Ive assessed these recent AI wearable attempts, his judgment was characteristically blunt. “Those were very poor products,” he told Bloomberg about the Humane AI Pin and Rabbit R1. “There has been an absence of new ways of thinking expressed in products.”
It’s harsh criticism that carries weight — Ive actually cracked the wearable code twice. Apple’s AirPods transformed wireless earbuds from a niche curiosity into an almost $20 billion business. The Apple Watch, after a rocky start, became the world’s best-selling smartwatch by focusing on fitness and notifications rather than trying to replicate the iPhone experience on your wrist.
But even Apple has struggled to expand beyond these successes, both before and after Ive’s tenure. The company has reportedly been working on smart glasses for years without anything to show for it, suggesting that even the masters of consumer hardware find wearables challenging.
The fundamental problem for most of these failed projects doesn’t come down to technological issues — it’s a lack of user-friendly design. Most wearable computing has been approached as a miniaturization exercise, cramming smartphone functionality into smaller, more awkward packages. The result: devices that do many things poorly rather than a few things exceptionally well.
Ive has experience avoiding this trap, having built his career on products that do a few things brilliantly rather than many things adequately. And crucially, timing might be on his side. Last year, Google co-founder Sergey Brin admitted that AI represents “the perfect hardware” application for smart glasses, acknowledging that Google Glass was more or less a decade ahead of its capabilities.
The hope is that generative AI finally provides the killer app wearables have been searching for. Imagine glasses that can translate languages in real-time, provide contextual information about your surroundings, or serve as a genuinely hands-free computing interface — experiences that actually require being worn rather than just carried in your pocket.
Creative Strategies analyst Ben Bajarin told Yahoo Finance (APO) that we are “on the cusp” of AI wearables taking off, with more products besides whatever OpenAI comes up with potentially hitting markets within 12 to 24 months.
The tide may already be turning. Meta’s (META) Ray-Ban smart glasses have sold two million pairs since their 2023 launch, with the company planning to produce 10 million units annually by 2026. While these glasses lack displays and primarily function as AI-powered cameras and assistants, they’ve proven that consumers will wear smart glasses if they look normal and solve real problems. Meta is betting heavily on the category, spending on Super Bowl ads and planning display-equipped glasses for later this year.
Whether this Ive and OpenAI partnership will succeed where Google, Microsoft, Humane, and countless others have failed remains to be seen. The wearables graveyard is vast, filled with the dreams of brilliant engineers and the disappointments of consumers who wanted to believe.
But for the first time in years, there’s reason to think wearables might finally fulfill their long-promised potential. With OpenAI’s intelligence married to Ive’s design chops, we might see a device people don’t just want to buy — but actually want to wear.
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