Every so often a tech rumour is strange enough to stick, and this one is shaped like a doughnut. According to a Bloomberg report picked up widely, OpenAI's first piece of hardware — long teased as the “physical manifestation” of ChatGPT — will reportedly be a screenless, doughnut-shaped smart speaker.
What it's meant to be
The device is said to be built to be carried around your home, moved from a kitchen counter to a bedside table as you go. Bloomberg's sources describe it as made from “high-quality metal”, with a “premium look” and, oddly, distinct “moving parts”. It is being developed with LoveFrom, the design studio founded by Jony Ive, the former Apple designer behind the look of the iPhone, with a launch pencilled in for some time in 2027. The pitch, as earlier leaks framed it, is a device you keep with you rather than mount in one spot — the long-promised “physical manifestation” of ChatGPT, now given a form. Quite what those “moving parts” are meant to do, no one outside OpenAI seems to know.
The price is the shock
Here's the part that raised eyebrows: the speaker could sell for $300 to $400 a unit. To put that in perspective, most of Amazon's smart-home speakers run from about $40 at the bottom to $240 at the top — so OpenAI would be asking a clear premium for a first-generation gadget. And smart speakers have not always been an easy or profitable business to break into; a high price tag may not help. It would also be OpenAI's first real step into selling physical hardware — a very different game from shipping software.
One giant caveat runs under all of it: every detail here comes from a single Bloomberg report citing unnamed sources, and OpenAI has confirmed none of it. The timing is awkward, too: OpenAI's hardware push is unfolding while Apple, the current king of hardware, presses a lawsuit accusing it of stealing trade secrets — a claim OpenAI denies. Whether the doughnut is real, and whether anyone pays premium money for it, is a 2027 question.
