Tim Hardwick, reporting for MacRumors:

OpenAI is said to be fast-tracking development of its first “AI agent phone,” with the company now aiming to mass produce the device as early as the first half of next year, according to industry analyst Ming-Chi Kuo.

Late last month, Kuo revealed OpenAI’s work on a smartphone, contradicting earlier reports that the company had no plans to enter the mobile market. Kuo said MediaTek and Qualcomm are the chosen chip partners and Luxshare Precision Industry is the exclusive manufacturing partner, with mass production scheduled for 2028.

I was quite bullish on Jony Ive’s pedigree of making beloved products, so much so that I initially expressed optimism about the collaboration between his LoveFrom design firm and OpenAI, but it appears that was wrongheaded.

The ChatGPT app, for three years, has remained at the top of the App Store and Google Play Store. It is one of the most popular mobile applications of all time. When people want to talk to ChatGPT, they do so from the app and website. Frequent users add Home Screen and Lock Screen widgets for easy access, and power users can invoke ChatGPT by pressing Option-Space on their Mac if they have the desktop or Codex apps installed. ChatGPT is practically everywhere — the only market the company is missing out on is the Apple Watch. What I’m saying here is that there is zero friction to using ChatGPT on any device today. It might even become more frictionless after the “more personalized Siri” presumably launches in the fall.

People, under no circumstance, will ever purchase a smartphone made by OpenAI. This market is entirely nonexistent. If these rumors are credible, and OpenAI is indeed making a smartphone — either running its own operating system or, most likely, Android — it will become one of the most embarrassing failures in consumer technology. Even disregarding the lack of friction in using ChatGPT on iOS or Android today, generative artificial intelligence is one of the most disliked technologies in the world. A smartphone littered with “AI slop” — and that will be almost entirely vibe-coded — will be widely regarded as an abysmal experience. Nobody wants this. Nobody wants to pay OpenAI for anything, let alone an AI slop phone that’s worse than their iPhone and uses one of the most disliked technologies in existence.

Of course, this rumor is coming from Ming-Chi Kuo, who leaks at the supply chain level. This could be a very different product that utilizes the same processors and other components. I hope it is — I don’t think Ive is so myopic that he’d choose to build an Android smartphone. That doesn’t sound like Jony Ive, and the only way OpenAI could ever get him to make something like that is if they paid him more money than the sun is worth. Such a device is anathema to the core ideas Ive has espoused throughout his career at Apple: simplicity, utility, and beauty. Generative AI doesn’t make mobile user interfaces simpler, more useful, or more beautiful. Agents have great potential in knowledge work, but they’re no good at scrolling social media, watching video, or capturing photos. This is what people do on their smartphones, and if they ever want to conjure up an agent, well, the ChatGPT app is right there.

What are we even doing anymore?