OpenAI's Puck Asks Users to Abandon Their Phones
OpenAI is building a $300 smart speaker the size of a hockey puck, designed by Jony Ive. It has moving parts for reasons nobody has explained yet. The device won't have a screen. It will be battery-powered. It will launch in 2027. Is conveniently far enough away that expectations can calcify into faith before anyone has to actually use the thing.
This is the Newton, 1993. Or the Tablet PC, 2002. The pattern is so reliable you could set a watch to it, if watches still mattered.
In 1993, Apple released the MessagePad Newton—a device that would let people write with a stylus and have handwriting recognition convert their notes to text. It was visionary product design married to technology that couldn't deliver on its premise. The Newton recognized maybe 70 percent of what you wrote. Sounds functional until you're in a meeting and your notes come out as incomprehensible garbage. Microsoft learned nothing and spent billions on Tablet PCs a decade later, asking office workers to hold a screen at arm's length and write on glass while their hands blocked the view. Both had legendary designers and venture capital and the absolute certainty that users were wrong about their own needs.
The structural similarity isn't the form factor. It's this: a software-first company with no manufacturing DNA launches a single-purpose hardware device priced premium, designed by someone with a storied legacy, solving a problem users didn't know they had. The Newton asked you to adopt new behavior—learning to trust a machine's interpretation of your handwriting—to justify buying the device. The Tablet PC asked you to change how you held and worked with screens. OpenAI's puck asks you to prefer talking to a hockey puck over talking to your phone. Already has ChatGPT built in and costs less.
The named variable this time: Ive is designing a speaker, not a input device. Sound is harder to fail at. A hockey puck that plays music decently and responds to voice commands can succeed where the Newton crashed because it doesn't require users to change anything about how they think. They already talk to their phones. They already expect speakers to sound good. The real question isn't whether Ive can make it beautiful. It's whether anyone will carry it instead of the device already in their pocket. Most successful hardware doesn't ask users to do that. It asks them to do something they were already trying to do, just better. When you're evaluating your own work—creative, professional, whatever—notice when you're asking your collaborators or audience to adopt new behaviors to use what you've made versus simply doing what they were already doing, but improved. The Newton failed because it asked for behavior change. The moving parts on this puck will succeed or fail on the same axis.
