OpenAI Holds 2027 Ship Date for Ive Device Despite Apple Suit

OpenAI still expects to unveil its first hardware product this year and ship it in 2027, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, even as Apple's trade-secret suit puts the recruiting and supplier runway that timeline depends on under stress. The device, coming out of the io Products team OpenAI acquired for approximately $6.5 billion in an all-stock deal, is the screen-free, pocket-sized companion Jony Ive has described as a 'third core device' alongside a laptop and a phone.

The suit alleges more than 400 former Apple workers are now at OpenAI, that recruits were asked to bring unreleased products, prototypes, CAD designs and supplier details with them, and that they were coached on evading Apple's security procedures using a checklist developed by Apple's former iPhone design chief. Apple names specific engineers, including former Apple designer Tang Yew Tan, whom it accuses of taking confidential supplier data, and Chang Liu, whom it says downloaded secret documents. The complaint calls OpenAI's hardware effort 'rotten to its core.'

Why this actually matters for the timeline: the shortest path to shipping a hundred-million-unit consumer electronics product still runs through people who have done exactly that at Apple, and through a supplier base Apple also uses. Even before a verdict, injunctions, discovery and simple supplier caution can slow the parts of the plan that depend on shared talent and shared vendors, which right now is most of it. Sam Altman's public posture, per Yahoo Finance, is that OpenAI is 'not afraid' of Apple, and internal expectations as of the filing are unchanged.

The honest caveat is that Gurman's reporting is single-sourced on the timeline itself, hedged with a note it 'could still change as OpenAI digests Apple's claims,' and the article does not spell out what changes, if any, OpenAI has already made to recruiting or clean-room procedures. Related io products described in the reporting, a $200 to $300 smart speaker and an AI agent phone running on a customized MediaTek chip targeting the first half of 2027, sit on their own tracks and may or may not move with the core device.

The forward read is straightforward. Anyone building consumer AI hardware outside Apple, including Google, Meta and Samsung, just got a marginally easier recruiting environment if OpenAI slips, and OpenAI's cleanest answer is to ship something in 2027 the courtroom timeline cannot catch.