There are very few designers in the world whose next move genuinely matters to the entire industry.
Jony Ive is one of them.
If you need the introduction: Ive spent decades at Apple as its chief design officer and was the creative force behind nearly everything the company made that people actually fell in love with — the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad, the MacBook Air. Products that did not just sell in enormous numbers but reshaped how entire generations thought about what a consumer device could look, feel, and mean. He did not just design products. He shaped culture.
He left Apple in 2019, quietly, after a long and reportedly complicated final chapter there. He took some of the best designers in the world with him long-time collaborators including Marc Newson and founded LoveFrom, an independent creative studio with no fixed brief, no quarterly targets, and no obligation to ship a new product every September.
For a while, the design world watched and waited. What do you do after you have already changed everything?
Apparently, you change everything again. Just in a different category.
Since leaving Apple, two collaborations have captured the attention of anyone who pays close attention to where design is going. One involves an electric Ferrari. One involves an AI device being built with Sam Altman and OpenAI. Both are enormous bets. Both are entirely on brand for someone who has never seemed particularly interested in the safe choice.
The OpenAI Chapter: A Device That Does Not Want to Be a PhoneThe first collaboration most people heard about was the announcement that Ive and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman were working together on an AI hardware device a partnership that eventually led to OpenAI acquiring Ive’s hardware startup, io Products, for $6.5 billion in May 2025.
That is not a typo. $6.5 billion for a studio that had not released a single product.
The price tag tells you everything about how seriously both parties are taking what comes next.
What is being built is deliberately kept vague, but enough has leaked and been officially confirmed to understand the philosophy behind it. Multiple devices are reportedly in development — a smart speaker with an integrated camera, an earbud-style wearable codenamed “Sweetpea,” and a pen-like device internally referred to as “Gumdrop.” The first product is expected to ship in early 2027, after an initial 2026 target quietly slipped, partly due to a trademark dispute that forced the team to retire the “io” branding entirely.
The design language being described for these devices is the most interesting part. Ive and Altman have been consistently specific about what they do not want: screens, distraction, the relentless demand for attention that smartphones have created. They have described the device as “peaceful” and an “active participant” something that Altman said he wanted to “make people feel joy.” It is being built to be contextually aware of its surroundings, able to observe and suggest, without needing to be constantly looked at.
“Simpler than an iPhone” was one of the phrases used. Which, from the man who designed the iPhone, is either brilliant positioning or the most ambitious understatement in product history.
Sam Altman himself called the first prototype “jaw-droppingly good” when it was confirmed in November 2025. We have not seen it. But the fact that the person with the most to lose from overpromising is publicly gushing about it suggests it is at least real, and at least remarkable.
The OpenAI device is the unknown quantity. The Ferrari, on the other hand, just landed.
The Ferrari Luce: The Most Consequential Car Launch in YearsOn May 25, 2026, Ferrari unveiled the Luce in Rome its first fully electric vehicle, and the most significant design departure the brand has made in its entire history.
Luce means “light” in Italian. The name is deliberate. Ferrari is not just launching a new car. It is announcing a new design philosophy for the electric era and it chose Jony Ive and Marc Newson at LoveFrom to define what that looks like.
The reveal itself was staged in phases, which told you something about how Ferrari and LoveFrom think about this launch. The world did not get the full car first. It got the interior — the steering wheel, the dashboard, the materials, the surfaces that the driver would actually touch and interact with. The experience before the spectacle. The human relationship before the performance numbers.
That is a design studio talking, not a marketing department. And it signals what this car is actually about.
The Luce is, on paper, unlike any Ferrari that has ever existed. It is a five-door sedan with five seats, rear-hinged doors, and a silhouette that makes you look twice before the badge fully registers. It is over five metres long, weighs more than two tonnes, and is powered by four electric motors producing over 1,000 horsepower enough to push it past 310 kilometres per hour with a range of more than 500 kilometres. The battery is a 122 kWh unit developed by Ferrari with future-proofing built in, designed to accept different battery cell technology as it evolves.
The exterior is built around a giant glass shell a continuous windscreen and glass surface that wraps all the way down below the beltline, something Marc Newson described as existing on concept cars in the sixties but essentially never in production reality. Floating aerodynamic wings at the front and rear frame an otherwise smooth, convex, edge-free body. No sharp angles. No aggression. A teardrop in motion.
Inside, LoveFrom did something that feels almost radical by modern automotive standards: they pushed back against screens. The Luce has precision-engineered mechanical buttons, dials, toggles, and switches physical controls, analogue feel, tactile interaction blended with digital displays that serve the experience rather than dominate it. The three-spoke steering wheel is machined from 100% recycled aluminium. The materials throughout are leather, glass, and anodised aluminium. Nothing is gratuitous. Everything is considered.
It is the car that the cancelled Apple Car always felt like it might have been. And it arrives starting at €550,000 roughly $640,000 with deliveries beginning in late 2026 and the US launch following in the second quarter of 2027.
Ferrari’s CEO, Benedetto Vigna, called it “the result of five years of work.” Their chief commercial officer described it as wanting to “talk in a different language.” Both of those statements are true and possibly undersell what is actually being attempted.
This Is Not a Car Problem. It Is a Culture Problem.Ferrari has a famous saying: when you buy a Ferrari, you are buying the engine. Everything else is for free.
The engine is the whole point. The sound, the vibration, the visceral sensation of combustion-powered performance that is what people are paying for, what they are waiting on lists for, what they are telling their grandchildren about. Ferrari is not selling transportation. It is selling a feeling that petrol makes and electricity does not.
So designing an electric Ferrari is not a design problem. It is a society problem. A tradition problem. A this-is-who-we-are-and-you-want-us-to-change problem.
Ferrari has even added a layer of engineering to try to bridge that gap the Luce amplifies the natural vibration sounds from its electric powertrain to preserve some of the visceral sensation associated with combustion-engine cars. Which is either a brilliant acknowledgment that the emotional connection matters, or a slightly poetic admission that the original cannot be fully replaced. Probably both.
You only need to look at how badly this can go to understand what is at stake.
In November 2024, Jaguar attempted its own dramatic reinvention. The iconic British brand long associated with the leaping jaguar, the growler badge, and decades of performance heritage unveiled a complete rebrand aimed at repositioning it as a modern all-electric luxury brand. They deleted their entire social media history overnight. They retired the growler logo in favour of a minimalist “J.” And they launched a 32-second advertisement featuring androgynous models in avant-garde fashion, posed in abstract pink landscapes, with not a single car in sight.
The slogans were “Delete Ordinary.” “Live Vivid.” “Copy Nothing.”
Within 48 hours, the video had 160 million views almost entirely from people who were furious. Elon Musk’s four-word response became the most viral reaction. Sales had already been falling, dropping nearly 50% between 2022 and 2024. The campaign accelerated the chaos. Jaguar subsequently fired its marketing agency, Accenture Song, and has spent the time since trying to rebuild credibility it arguably never needed to sacrifice.
The lesson from Jaguar is not that bold rebranding is wrong. It is that you cannot ask people to abandon the thing they love about you before you have shown them something worth loving instead. You cannot lead with the identity and follow up with the product. In heritage brands, the product earns the story not the other way around.
Ferrari, at least so far, seems to understand this. The Luce was revealed with performance numbers alongside the poetry. The craft was front and centre. The product came first.
What This Actually RepresentsFerrari is repositioning itself from being an engine brand to being a materials, form, and experience brand. That is a seismic shift for a company whose entire identity has been built around what happens under the bonnet.
Whether it works will not be decided by designers or journalists. It will be decided by the people with half a million dollars, a driveway, and a choice between a Luce and a 296 GTB. I am not in that room and neither are most people writing about this. History, as it happens, will tell that story.
But what already feels significant is the approach itself.
Ive’s design philosophy has always been about removing complexity to reveal clarity stripping away what does not need to be there until what remains is only what matters. The Luce exterior, with its smooth surfaces and absence of aggression, reads like that same thinking applied to automotive form. The interior, with its physical controls and considered materials, reads like a direct argument against the touchscreen-everything minimalism that Tesla popularised and everyone else copy-pasted.
It is a car designed by someone who spent thirty years thinking about what it means for a human to interact with a product. Not a machine to drive. A product to live with.
The influence of that thinking on the automotive world will take years to fully land the same way it took years to understand how deeply the iPhone had changed everything. But the direction it points is clear: design thinking, intentionality, and the willingness to make something genuinely considered rather than just technically impressive, is the differentiator. Now, as in the consumer device world, as in software, as everywhere else that craft is being squeezed out.
Two Bets. One Designer. What Comes Next.Jony Ive has now placed two of the most interesting bets in product design simultaneously.
One is an AI device that wants to reduce our dependence on screens in an era when screens are still winning. The other is a Ferrari for people who have always bought Ferraris for the one thing it no longer has.
Both of these could fail. Both of them could change the category they land in. Both of them are being approached with a seriousness and intention that is becoming increasingly rare — and increasingly obvious in a world where most products are built to ship, not to last.
Whether people buy the Luce because of Jony Ive, or because it is a Ferrari, or because it is something they have never quite seen before, is a question I genuinely do not know the answer to. I am curious how many existing Ferrari owners will add one to their collection versus how many new buyers it attracts. I am curious whether the Luce becomes the moment Ferrari either expands its world or accidentally narrows it.
What I am not curious about is whether any of this will matter to the industry. It already does.
The next chapter of Jony Ive’s design influence has begun. And whether the Luce and the OpenAI device succeed or stumble, the standard they are being held to the quality of thinking behind them, the intentionality of the craft is the kind of standard the whole industry needs more of right now.
We will know soon enough if the world is ready.