In Silicon Valley, a certain kind of confidence appears just before an expensive project fails. It debuted with the Humane AI Pin, a $700 brooch-like gadget that was meant to take the place of your screen but quickly became a joke. It reappeared with the Rabbit R1, which was orange, sincere, and ultimately constrained. OpenAI, Apple, Meta, and a few chipmakers are all discreetly working toward what is loosely referred to as the truly intelligent smartphone. These days, it appears in a different form and is associated with bigger names and much more money.
The phrase is working hard on its own. What it means is not entirely agreed upon. According to rumors that have been going around since the beginning of the year, OpenAI may be referring to a real phone—not a wearable or a pendant, but a gadget based on self-governing agents that make travel arrangements, respond to messages, and carry out tasks covertly without requiring you to tap through a single app. Ming-Chi Kuo, an analyst for Apple, has connected the endeavor to Qualcomm and MediaTek for processors, with Luxshare managing production and a projected production date of 2028. The runway is quite long. It implies that this isn’t a side project.
According to Sam Altman, the gadget his team is developing with former Apple designer Jony Ive is not intended to destroy smartphones; rather, he has likened it to how phones have never destroyed laptops. It’s a reassuring and possibly accurate analogy. However, it also seems like something you say when you’re unsure of what you’ve created.
In contrast, Meta has been promoting its Orion smart glasses since 2024 because it believes that intelligence should be on your face rather than in your pocket. According to reports, Apple is experimenting with wearable pins and AI-enabled AirPods. The fact that none of these businesses appear to be operating from the same blueprint speaks volumes about how uneasy the current situation is.
It’s important to keep in mind that the smartphone itself wasn’t an original concept. Released in 1994, IBM’s Simon featured a touchscreen, email, and an hour-long battery. Before it disappeared, it sold about 50,000 units. When a new device is ridiculed online within its first week of release, it’s easy to forget that genuinely new categories of devices tend to appear awkward at first and obvious only in hindsight.
But this time, there’s a significant difference. Previous AI hardware failed in part because it attempted to completely replace the phone by removing the screen and assuming users would want that. Conversely, analysts now seem to believe that consumers might not want a new category of devices at all. They might simply want their current phone to become more sophisticated so that it can perform more tasks without drawing attention to itself.
That problem is more difficult than it seems. Real intelligence, which anticipates rather than responds, necessitates ongoing awareness of a person’s life, including their schedule, conversations, and routines. A phone that knows everything about you is also a phone that is listening to everything around you, including the people who never agreed to that. Altman has described the experience he’s aiming for as something like sitting in a peaceful cabin by a lake, which is a lovely image and raises an obvious question.
It’s still genuinely unclear if any of this will eventually qualify as a “intelligent” device. The smartphone has already withstood 25 years of anticipated obsolescence. Instead of being completely replaced by something new, it might just absorb this next wave as well, becoming smarter at the edges. It’s difficult not to suspect that’s precisely what’s going to happen as the money and engineering talent pour into this race.
