uying yet another dedicated gadget just to use an AI assistant is an idea that looks increasingly questionable with every new product announcement. According to tech publications as of August 2026, former Apple design chief Jony Ive and OpenAI are developing a compact portable device together. It is a screenless puck crammed with microphones, cameras, and sensors. Roughly the size of a hockey puck, leaks have already nicknamed it the "donut." While OpenAI has not held an official unveiling yet, the industry is clearly trying to convince everyone to carry a second piece of hardware alongside their smartphone.
A Body Without a Screen
The creators' reasoning is obvious: they want to free users from endless scrolling and typing. Following the 2025 integration of the io Products team into OpenAI, the company began discussing a family of proprietary hardware products. OpenAI leadership, including Sam Altman and CFO Sarah Friar, framed the issue directly: graphical interfaces are outdated.
User interfaces are still largely stuck in a previous technological era.
Yet stripping away the display and forcing users to talk out loud to a plastic puck in the street or at the office feels less like a leap forward and more like a step backward in usability. Without powerful on-device processing, any clip like this turns into dead silicon on the subway or outside the city, demanding a constant cloud subscription to do anything useful.
Memory Inside the Ecosystem
The core problem with such standalone gadgets is that they attempt to reinvent the wheel while established hardware makers are baking neural networks directly into what you already carry in your pocket or wear on your ears. Apple is expanding on-device intelligence across iPhones, while rivals integrate voice assistants directly into standard wireless earbuds without unnecessary intermediaries. Computations are migrating to the phone's processor, handling tasks faster and without transmitting every sound to external servers.
A standalone, screenless AI puck risks repeating the fate of the Humane AI Pin and the Rabbit R1, heading straight for a desk drawer. An extra device requires another charger and constant attention, but in practice delivers nothing that regular headphones or the smartphone you already own will not easily handle.