A talking metal donut with moving parts, sitting on your kitchen counter, priced somewhere between $300 and $400. That’s the OpenAI hardware device as Bloomberg now describes it, and the price is the part worth staring at.
Amazon‘s smart home speakers run from $40 at the low end to $240 at the high end. OpenAI’s first piece of hardware would start above where Amazon’s lineup stops.
That’s not a small gap. It’s the difference between an impulse buy and a purchase you think about for a week.
The donut shape has a reason behind it
Sources told Bloomberg the device is “donut-shaped” specifically so you can pick it up and move it around the house, from a bedside table to a kitchen counter. It’ll be built from “high-quality metal” and have what the report calls a “premium look.”
And then there’s the detail nobody has explained: distinct “moving parts.”
Moving parts in a speaker could mean a lot of things. A rotating element? Something that tracks you across a room? Bloomberg’s sources didn’t say, and OpenAI hasn’t either. It’s the single strangest thing in the report and the one that’ll determine whether this reads as a product or a curiosity.
Jony Ive’s studio is behind the design
The device is being developed with LoveFrom, the design studio founded by former Apple designer Jony Ive. Bloomberg writes it’ll likely arrive at some point in 2027.
That’s a long runway. Long enough that the hardware landscape it launches into may look nothing like today’s.
The logic of OpenAI building a smart home device isn’t hard to follow. Put ChatGPT on a counter and it stops being an app you open and starts being a thing that’s just there, in the room, the way Alexa became furniture in millions of homes.
Smart speakers have been a rough business
Here’s the problem with that plan. Smart speakers historically haven’t always been profitable, and the category has proven a difficult one to break into. Amazon and Google spent years selling hardware at or near cost to win placement in living rooms, and the payoff never fully materialized the way anyone expected.
OpenAI would be entering that market from above, at $300 to $400, against incumbents who’ve spent a decade training buyers to expect these things to be cheap. The high price point might not help.
Apple is already suing
OpenAI’s hardware push has also collected a lawsuit. Apple, the current king of hardware, has accused the AI lab of stealing trade secrets. OpenAI has denied wrongdoing.
So the company hiring Apple’s most famous former designer is now in court with Apple, over a product that won’t ship until 2027 at the earliest.
If you’re waiting to decide whether to buy one, you have roughly a year and a half. Spend it watching 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.
