Picture a metal donut that talks back, has moving parts, and sits on your kitchen counter with a $300 to $400 sticker on it. That’s how Bloomberg now characterizes OpenAI’s hardware device — and the number is the detail that demands a second look.
Amazon’s smart home speakers span $40 at the bottom of the range to $240 at the top. OpenAI’s debut hardware would open above the point where Amazon’s lineup ends.
That gap isn’t trivial. It separates a thing you grab without thinking from a thing you mull over for a week.
There’s logic to the donut shape
According to sources who spoke with Bloomberg, the “donut-shaped” form exists precisely so the thing can be lifted and carried around the house — bedside table one moment, kitchen counter the next. The report says it’ll use “high-quality metal” and carry what it describes as a “premium look.”
Then comes the part left unexplained by anyone: those distinct “moving parts.”
Plenty of things could qualify as moving parts inside a speaker. A component that rotates? Something that follows you as you cross a room? Neither Bloomberg’s sources nor OpenAI has clarified. It’s easily the oddest element of the report, and the one that decides whether this lands as a product or a novelty.
The design comes from Jony Ive’s studio
Development is happening alongside LoveFrom, the design studio started by ex-Apple designer Jony Ive. Bloomberg reports the device will probably show up sometime in 2027.
That’s a lengthy runway — long enough that the hardware market it eventually enters could bear little resemblance to the current one.
Why OpenAI would want a smart home device is easy enough to trace. Put ChatGPT on a counter and it quits being an app you launch and becomes something simply present in the room — the way Alexa turned into furniture across millions of households.
Smart speakers have been a brutal business
And that’s where the plan runs into trouble. Smart speakers historically haven’t always been profitable, and the category has proven a difficult one to break into. Amazon and Google poured years into selling hardware at or close to cost just to claim living room real estate, and the eventual return never quite arrived as anyone had anticipated.
OpenAI would be walking into that market from the top, at $300 to $400, facing incumbents that have spent ten years conditioning shoppers to think of these devices as cheap. That premium price may not do the company any favors.
Apple has already filed suit
A lawsuit has attached itself to OpenAI’s hardware ambitions, too. Apple — currently the reigning power in hardware — has accused the AI lab of stealing trade secrets. OpenAI has denied wrongdoing.
Which leaves the company that recruited Apple’s best-known former designer squaring off against Apple in court, over something that won’t reach buyers before 2027 at the soonest.
Anyone weighing whether to buy one has roughly eighteen months to think it over. Use them to watch for what those moving parts actually do, because at $300 to $400 against a $240 ceiling elsewhere, that’s the feature that has to justify the difference.