With AI’s rise, the future of handheld devices is dimming
Words by STEVE SANDERS
Illustration by ADOLFO CORREA
The biggest pop princess strides on stage at Coachella, and the crowd goes wild. The vibes are high, the atmosphere is electric, but something feels different. It’s the year 2030, and adoring fans are not holding up their phones to record every twerk and top C note, as they have for nearly a quarter century. Instead, they’re wearing augmented reality spectacles that are recording the moment for posterity. Some sport quarter-size pendants around their necks that light up as their artificial intelligence assistants communicate via earbuds.
After the concert, fans stream to the nearby skyport, where — after speaking their boarding pass codes, delivered by said assistants — they step into driverless electric air taxis that ferry them 120 miles from the desert to Los Angeles in 20 minutes.
Fanciful? It may not be that far off. The dawn of the AI revolution has set in motion a frenzy not seen since the dot-com boom of the late 1990s. And the biggest beasts in Big Tech and start-ups have set their eyes on a new prize: inventing the transformative device of the AI age — one that will kill the smartphone, years after Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone in 2007.
The underlying conceit is that AI is a fundamentally different type of technology that makes possible — even necessitates — a different type of device. In an age of AI that can understand the world and respond in natural language, is hunting and pecking on a handheld black rectangle the best we can do? Do we even need a screen if we can simply talk to and be understood by our device? Can we remediate some of the societal damage generated by our obsession with our smartphones?
The industry is actively hunting for this white whale. Mark Zuckerberg is reportedly offering top AI engineers $100 million to work at his new superintelligence lab. Meta has plowed billions of dollars into Ray-Ban–designed AI glasses that project digital information onto the real world, embedded with a conversational assistant and temple-tip speakers that approximate the effect of earbuds. Zuckerberg rarely makes a public appearance without donning a pair.
Alphabet still bears the scars from Google Glass, the tech-enabled spectacles it rolled in 2012 to universal derision. Its wearers were dubbed “Glassholes,” and the product was swiftly discontinued. Yet the company announced in 2024 that it was working on a new line of AI-enabled spectacles that will be “glasses you’ll want to wear.”
Perhaps most eye-catching, Sam Altman, the billionaire cofounder of ChatGPT developer OpenAI, and Jony Ive, Apple’s billionaire former designer, announced in May that OpenAI was swallowing Ive’s year-old design firm, io. Under the deal, Ive joined ChatGPT as a hardware designer.
The mandate for tech’s most famous product mind — Ive designed the iPhone and once called Steve Jobs his “spiritual partner” — is to create a “family of devices” that will reimagine how to use technology in a world upended by AI.
Ive’s team has already created a prototype, which could be unveiled next year. Altman said, “Jony called one day and said, ‘This is the best work our team has ever done.’ I mean, Jony did the iPhone. Jony did the MacBook Pro. These are the defining ways people use technology.… Jony recently gave me one of the prototypes of the device for the first time to take home, and I’ve been able to live with it. And I think it is the coolest piece of technology that the world will have ever seen.”
“Just as the iPhone reimagined the entire consumer electronics industry into one device, it feels like we are
at a similar inflection point.”
Om Malik
Both have kept mum on what the new gizmo will look like. Speculation is that it may be screenless, voice controlled, and “contextually aware.” Om Malik, a tech investor and commentator, said, “You can’t deny that we are living in a moment of incredible innovation and reinvention because of AI. And just as the iPhone 18 years ago reimagined the phone, the PC, the camera, and the consumer electronics industry into one device, it feels like we are at a similar inflection point.”
All of which makes Apple’s predicament even more perplexing. While rivals scramble, the Cupertino giant has meekly rolled out Apple Intelligence, an AI system that was meant to integrate AI into all aspects of its devices. It has been virtually imperceptible to users. When it has shown up, it often makes mistakes, like providing erroneous summaries of current events.
Ben Thompson of Stratechery, the specialist tech publisher, dubbed Apple’s strategy a “heads-in-the-sand failure.” He said Apple risks being left behind amid damning reports of company executives dismissing the technology: “The biggest lesson of the last few years is that the best time for the company to take AI seriously was years ago.” Apple, he said, may be forced to break the bank and acquire a leading AI lab to get back in the race.
Start-ups, meanwhile, are also having a go. Dan Siroker is a cofounder of Limitless, which has developed a circular pendant — about the size of a quarter — that is an always-on, AI-enabled listening device. Users can clip it to a lapel or wear it as a necklace. The idea, Siroker says, is to effectively turn one’s entire life into a searchable archive. Or, as the company tagline says, “to free the human mind from its biological limitations.”
The pendant listens and transcribes everything its wearer says — and everything said to them — all day, every day. Its AI then analyzes all these interactions and sends push notifications about how the wearer can improve as a colleague, a partner, or a parent. “It’s a life coach. It’s a work coach. If you just look at one day of your life and you could ask AI what you could do better, you’d be shocked at what to come up with. And you know, it’s not for everyone. Not everyone wants to be better in life. But if you do, this is magic,” Siroker says. “My kids are happy I wear the pendant because it makes me a better dad.”
A challenge for Limitless — and for Ive and Altman if they pursue a device that is, as rumored, “contextually aware” — is privacy. How do companies solve for consent? In California, a private conversation can be recorded only if all parties agree.
And there are other concerns. A small but growing number of cases have emerged of people striking up deep, emotional connections with AI, contributing to what the former U.S. surgeon general has called a loneliness “epidemic.” A new era of devices that make it far easier to talk with AI all day could exacerbate the trend, replacing human relationships with digital ones.
Ive, for one, is well aware of the societal stakes. In a recent interview, he appeared to refer to the iPhone when he said, “Certain products that I’ve been very, very involved with, I think there were some unintended consequences that were far from pleasant.”
Let’s hope he does better this time around.
This story originally appeared in the Fall 2025 issue of C Magazine.
Discover more CULTURE news.
See the story in our digital edition
