The Jetsons Dream: Who's Going to Deliver?

The Jetsons premiered in 1962 with chatty appliances, airborne commutes, and a house-bot named Rosie tidying life's loose ends. Six decades later we're still hunched over rectangles, arguing with voice assistants that forget what we said two sentences ago.

Why the stall? My hunch: we're waiting for the perfect collision of audacity, design empathy, and industrial scale. Cue Sam Altman, Jony Ive, and their fresh $6.5 billion handshake. The only question is whether they'll need Apple's trillion-dollar launchpad to finally deliver that future - or whether they'll build it despite them.

What follows is pure speculation - an alt-timeline drawn in the margins of tomorrow's newspaper.

The Visionaries Who Think Different

There's a pattern to world-changing CEOs. They get kicked out of somewhere important, wander in the wilderness for a while, then return with a vengeance. Steve Jobs got booted from Apple in 1985 and came back in 1996 to save it from irrelevance. Sam Altman got ousted from OpenAI for about 72 hours before the board begged him to return with essentially unlimited power.

But whether they get fired or not isn't actually the point. The point is that there's a type of person who goes against what everyone expects. They look beyond the obvious and that makes everyone uncomfortable - especially the old goats on boards who'd probably still be using horses and carts if Henry Ford hadn't solved that for them. The irony is perfect: they drive to board meetings in cars, type on computers, and check their phones - all innovations created by exactly the kind of disruptive visionary they're voting to remove. They can't see the future being built because they're too comfortable with the last revolution's rewards.

Steve Jobs never worshipped the computer, nor the mouse that made it friendlier. He worshipped human creativity unleashed - the idea that a kid in a garage could challenge IBM, that a musician could become a producer, that anyone with an idea could change the world. The computer was just plumbing. The mouse was just a doorknob. What mattered was the room they opened into. From click-wheel to multitouch, his life's work was removing barriers between intention and creation. Siri, demoed months before his death, hinted at the ultimate removal: conversation itself. Trouble is, thirteen years later she's still a digital goldfish with a hearing problem who peaked at setting timers.

Sam Altman smells the same unfinished business. He doesn't worship AI any more than Jobs worshipped silicon. He worships what happens when technology finally stops getting in the way of being human. When anyone can build an app by describing it, write a book by speaking it, compose a symphony by humming it - they're not just accessing intelligence. They're expressing themselves. When a child can animate their drawings by asking nicely, they're not using AI - they're unlocking imagination that was always there. The promise isn't democratized intelligence; it's the full spectrum of human creativity finally set free. Large language models aren't the point; they're just better plumbing. The point is becoming more fully ourselves without technology's permission.

Enter Jony Ive, industrial empath and knight of aluminum minimalism. This is where vision becomes reality. Jobs had the mouse, but Ive made you want to stroke the aluminum. Altman has the AI, but Ive will make it feel invisible - like it was always there, helping without announcing itself. Post-Apple, he spent five quiet years sketching objects that behave more like companions than tools. The man who made us addicted to rectangles was, by his own admission, "disillusioned by the iPhone's impact on users' attention and anxiety."

Altman has now bought that sketchbook - lock, stock, and $6.5-billion barrel.

Three obsessions converge: Jobs's war on clunky interaction, Ive's talent for making technology feel invisible and inevitable, and Altman's conviction that AI is the last UI we'll ever need. At the levels these people operate, what we call "insane ambition" is just Tuesday morning. The only question is which runway they choose for takeoff.

The Fork in the Road

So here we are. OpenAI owns io. Altman and Ive are building "AI-powered computers" that will debut in 2026. Ive says everything in his career led to this moment. Altman calls their prototype "the coolest piece the world will have ever seen."

But there's something they're not saying out loud. Something that becomes obvious when you connect the dots. Altman doesn't just want to build devices - he wants to change the world. And to change the world, you need scale. Real scale. The kind that reaches everyone, not just early adopters.

Starting from scratch is hard. Even with a $300 billion valuation, OpenAI would be the new kid trying to convince everyone to abandon their iPhones. That's like trying to convince people to leave their homes because you've built a better neighborhood. Possible? Sure. Likely? Well.

But what if there was another way? What if, instead of competing with Apple, you could become Apple?

Consider two futures...

Scenario One: The Apple Revolution

Picture Tim Cook in a boardroom, staring at quarterly reports. Microsoft has Copilot deeply integrated into Windows. Google has Gemini running through Android. Apple has... Siri still asking if you meant to set a timer for 50 hours instead of 15 minutes.

The board does the math. OpenAI for $900 billion - about a third of Apple's value. It's audacious, but so was buying NeXT to get Steve Jobs back. That worked out pretty well.

In this future, Tim Cook gets a graceful exit (and probably a small country's GDP as a parting gift). Sam Altman gets the CEO chair. And Jony Ive? He becomes Chief Experience Officer — not just designing products, but redesigning Apple itself. For the first time, hardware, software, design, and technology report to one person, Jony. The one person who happens to have already changed how humanity interacts with technology.

The Rebirth begins immediately:

Siri dies on a Thursday. She's reborn the following Monday as something else entirely. It's ChatGPT, Whisper, DALL-E, and Sora rolled into one, but nobody needs to know the technical details. You just talk to your Mac, and watch it write your novel in Pages while you make coffee. "Hey Siri, design a logo for my bakery" actually produces a logo, not a web search for "logo design tips."

Apple OS emerges - one AI-native operating system across all devices. No more iOS, macOS, visionOS confusion. Just one intelligent system that knows whether you're wearing it, carrying it, or sitting at it. The kernel itself has transformers built in. Intelligence isn't added on top; it's baked into every electron.

The iPhone becomes Apple Phone. The MacBook becomes Apple Book. The iPad becomes Apple Pad. The iMac becomes Apple Desk. Simple names for magical devices. Even the branding gets the Jony treatment - clean, obvious, human.

Then comes the real revolution:

Apple Companion arrives. Nobody's quite sure what it looks like because that's the point - it could be a ring, an earring, something you wear and forget about. But it sees what you see, hears what you hear (with your permission, always with permission), and seamlessly connects to all your Apple devices. Start a conversation on your Phone, continue it on your Desk, finish it on your Pad - the Companion carries your context everywhere. Your thoughts flow uninterrupted across surfaces, each device picking up exactly where you left off.

Apple Vision emerges as glasses that adjust prescription automatically. You don't know you need glasses until you put them on and suddenly the world is sharp. They zoom on command, dim in bright light, enhance in darkness. For the visually impaired, they're life-changing. For everyone else, they're just magic.

Apple Health stops being an app and becomes the operating system for American healthcare. Hospitals run on it. Your Apple Watch doesn't just count steps; it's your medical record, your early warning system, your connection to care. With AI built in, doctors spend time with patients instead of paperwork.

And then - finally - Apple Robot. Not humanoid, nothing creepy. Just helpful. Your home cleaned, your groceries sorted, your life automated in ways that feel natural instead of intrusive. The Jetsons delivered, but with better design.

Scenario Two: The Parallel Path

But maybe that's too neat. Maybe Tim Cook plays it safe.

In this timeline, Apple buys Anthropic for $200 billion. It's a defensive move - Claude makes Siri competent, developers get better tools, everyone pretends this is innovation. Apple Intelligence (they'd still use that name) helps you write emails and organize photos. Very cool. Very incremental. The stock price holds steady.

Meanwhile, Sam and Jony build their device.

It's small, unobtrusive, almost invisible. When you first get it, you train it with your voice for some period. Just you talking, the device imprinting on you like a digital duckling, ensuring it bonds to your voice alone. This isn't a privacy feature - it's a privacy foundation. The device literally cannot hear anyone else unless you explicitly allow it. Others can even say "don't record me" and the device won't even transcribe their words. Privacy through physics, not policy.

This device doesn't replace your phone. Instead, it makes every surface smart. Your knowledge travels with you. Connect to any of your paired devices - Mac, PC, Linux terminal, whatever - and it becomes an extension of your mind. The device whispers suggestions, remembers context, executes commands. You're not tied to any ecosystem because you are the ecosystem.

But here's the challenge: without Apple's integrated empire, OpenAI needs to convince the world to adopt new standards. They need manufacturers to build compatible devices. They need developers to support new protocols. They need to be patient.

And patience, if we're being honest, isn't really Sam's thing.

Does OpenAI build their own OS? Create their own phones? Or do they try to infiltrate everyone else's systems like some kind of beneficial virus? Each path has its perils. Building an OS means competing with three giants. Playing nice means moving slowly. Neither option gets you to the Jetsons tomorrow.

The Choice That Defines Tomorrow

Here's what I think is really happening. Sam Altman sees himself not just as the next Steve Jobs, but as something more - the person who finally delivers on technology's broken promises. He's got the AI. He's got the ambition. And now he's got the designer who made the last revolution beautiful.

Apple, meanwhile, is counting beans. Tim Cook is brilliant at operations, but the company that once dared us to "Think Different" now seems content to think "Slightly Better, But Definitely Profitable." When's the last time Apple announced something that made your jaw drop? The Vision Pro? That's a $3,500 developer kit masquerading as a consumer product.

(Don't get me wrong - I love Apple. I'm typing this on a MacBook, checking my iPhone, ignoring my Apple Watch's suggestion to stand up. But love means wanting better.)

My hope is for Scenario One. Not because corporate takeovers are exciting - though this one would break the internet - but because the alternative feels like accepting mediocrity. Watching two geniuses try to build the future while navigating around Apple's walled garden is like watching Ferrari engineers build a minivan. Sure, it'll be the best minivan ever made, but is that really the point?

Sam Altman with Apple's resources wouldn't just build better products. He'd build the future we were promised. Jony Ive with total creative control wouldn't just design devices. He'd design a world where technology finally keeps its promises - where it amplifies humanity instead of addicting it.

We're always one cosmic sneeze away from oblivion - solar flare, rogue asteroid, pick your apocalypse. And we're spending our possibly final moments teaching Siri the difference between 'fifteen' and 'fifty'? The universe must be laughing.

Before we get smooshed or scorched, I'd really like my robot butler. And if Sam Altman needs to become Apple's CEO to make that happen? If he needs to channel his inner Steve Jobs, take the throne, and drag us into the future we were promised?

Well, Steve would probably find that funny. He always did appreciate a good coup.