Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive, said the company was paying $6.5 billion to buy IO, a one-year-old start-up created by Jony Ive, a former top Apple executive who designed the iPhone. The all-stock deal, which effectively unites Silicon Valley royalty, is intended to usher in what the two men call “a new family of products” for the age of artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I., which is shorthand for a future technology that achieves human-level intelligence.
$6.5 billion is a damn good valuation for a one-year-old startup, which says something about the current AI cycle. But what you may be less familiar with are Jony Ive's efforts to revitalize Jackson Square in downtown San Francisco. In a recent interview with Monocle, published in their June 2025 issue, it was reported that his company LoveFrom (check out their website, it's fun) has spent nearly $100 million on buildings in the area, equating to at least half a city block.
Jackson Square is one of the oldest areas of San Francisco. It dates back to the 1849 gold rush and is currently on the National Register of Historic Places. Ive also has a soft spot for the area. Apparently it was where he first landed in the US in 1989, after receiving a bursary following his graduation from Newcastle Polytechnic (now Northumbria University). So this is allegedly not about money:
“There’s no fiscal benefit for us in investing in these buildings; these aren’t a means to an end, if that end is generating revenue,” says Ive.
From a real estate perspective, I don't think this first part is true. There likely will be a fiscal benefit. As of the first quarter of 2025, downtown San Francisco's office vacancy rate was hovering somewhere above 30%. The pandemic infamously hollowed out the city and led to a bunch of negative externalities. But the city has always been a place of extreme boom and busts, and a place of disruption. It will reinvent itself.
So whether or not he cares about fiscal benefit, I think Ive has been accumulating property at exactly the right time — when almost everyone else is pessimistic on the city. At the same time, he's going above and beyond what a typical landlord would do. For instance, LoveFrom, quite famously, provided a pro bono rebrand for a much-loved and 50-year-old bookstore in the area, William Stout Architectural Books. The design agency allocates time for side projects just "for the love of doing it."
This is a form of city building that seems far less common in Canada. I'm talking about the scenario where a singular rich person decides that they really love a place and want to revitalize it. The other example that I have in my mind is Dan Gilbert and downtown Detroit. As of 2024, his firm Bedrock was reported to own 131 properties and approximately 18 million square feet of space, making him the largest and most prominent landlord in downtown.
I would also argue that this is the most effective way to do it. Because who is going to give more shits: the person running a fund with a 5-7 year time horizon and an IRR clock, or the intrinsically motivated person with a deep personal attachment to a place who wants nothing more than to see it thrive and succeed? My bet is on the latter. It also doesn't hurt when you strike an all-stock deal with OpenAI for $6.5 billion.
Cover photo by Frames For Your Heart on Unsplash
This is a longstanding joke / criticism among nerds:
Namely, it is the fact that the charging port for Apple's Magic Mouse is on its bottom, meaning, when it's being charged, you can't use it. This would be annoying if you ignored the low battery warnings and let it die in the middle of working on something critically important. And so lots of people think it's a ridiculous design. But is it? Here's an excerpt from a
I know I'm late to the party on this, but I finally tried Apple Vision Pro this weekend. I was in the Apple Store at the Toronto Eaton Center getting the battery replaced in my phone, so I decided to do a demo. And let me tell you -- I was totally blown away. I messaged everyone I knew (after I got my phone back) and told them that they need to try it.
To be clear, though, very few people right now want to actually buy this computing device. Initially, Apple was thinking that it would sell upwards of 800,000 units this year. But now it expects to sell somewhere closer to 400,000. Maybe. The device is too expensive, too bulky, and the use cases just aren't there for someone to feel they need to buy it.
I also found that, when I was looking at the world around me, I could tell I was looking at a video. It wasn't exactly perfect. (Vision Pro creates a mixed-reality experience by recording the world around you and then playing it back to you.) But that's okay. The hardware will get better. The price will come down. And the developer community will build a bunch of killer apps that nobody has even thought of yet.
https://twitter.com/Casey/status/1753848769118970152
None of this changes the fact that the device is still an astonishing technical achievement. The eye tracking works perfectly. All of my hand gestures were flawlessly picked up. And the overall experience was entirely immersive -- from 3D videos (recorded on regular iPhones) to a butterfly landing on my hand and a velociraptor flaring its nostrils right in front of me.
What was most impactful to me is that I could easily imagine a future where all of this works. Is this a more exciting way to watch sports? Yes. I sat courtside and Lebron dunked in my face. Is this a better way to watch movies on a plane? By far. Will this be used to help build buildings and coordinate design & engineering disciplines? Yes, absolutely, among many other things.
It is also easy to imagine how spatial computing is likely to dovetail with other innovations such as AI and blockchains. Mixed-reality or extended reality blurs the line between physical and digital. And in my mind, AI becomes the way in which we will want to interact with this new computing world. (It's not easy to type on a virtual keyboard.)
At the same time, digital artifacts will come to be viewed much differently when they're all blended in. An NFT sitting in a cold wallet is going to feel a lot different than an NFT hanging in a fully immersive 3D gallery that is viewed by millions of people. This strengthens the case for blockchains, and the ownership of digital objects, products, and services.
Maybe this is really far into the future. I don't know. But regardless, if you haven't already, I would encourage you to book a demo at your local Apple Store. However cool and great you think it will be, it will be better. I'm not suggesting you should buy one, but I am suggesting that you need to try it out and see a glimpse into the future.
And if any of you are working on Apple Vision Pro software that is somehow connected to the design and construction industry, I would love to hear from you and learn more about what you're up to. I have complete conviction that this will form the future of our industry. The best place to reach out is here.
Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive, said the company was paying $6.5 billion to buy IO, a one-year-old start-up created by Jony Ive, a former top Apple executive who designed the iPhone. The all-stock deal, which effectively unites Silicon Valley royalty, is intended to usher in what the two men call “a new family of products” for the age of artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I., which is shorthand for a future technology that achieves human-level intelligence.
$6.5 billion is a damn good valuation for a one-year-old startup, which says something about the current AI cycle. But what you may be less familiar with are Jony Ive's efforts to revitalize Jackson Square in downtown San Francisco. In a recent interview with Monocle, published in their June 2025 issue, it was reported that his company LoveFrom (check out their website, it's fun) has spent nearly $100 million on buildings in the area, equating to at least half a city block.
Jackson Square is one of the oldest areas of San Francisco. It dates back to the 1849 gold rush and is currently on the National Register of Historic Places. Ive also has a soft spot for the area. Apparently it was where he first landed in the US in 1989, after receiving a bursary following his graduation from Newcastle Polytechnic (now Northumbria University). So this is allegedly not about money:
“There’s no fiscal benefit for us in investing in these buildings; these aren’t a means to an end, if that end is generating revenue,” says Ive.
From a real estate perspective, I don't think this first part is true. There likely will be a fiscal benefit. As of the first quarter of 2025, downtown San Francisco's office vacancy rate was hovering somewhere above 30%. The pandemic infamously hollowed out the city and led to a bunch of negative externalities. But the city has always been a place of extreme boom and busts, and a place of disruption. It will reinvent itself.
So whether or not he cares about fiscal benefit, I think Ive has been accumulating property at exactly the right time — when almost everyone else is pessimistic on the city. At the same time, he's going above and beyond what a typical landlord would do. For instance, LoveFrom, quite famously, provided a pro bono rebrand for a much-loved and 50-year-old bookstore in the area, William Stout Architectural Books. The design agency allocates time for side projects just "for the love of doing it."
This is a form of city building that seems far less common in Canada. I'm talking about the scenario where a singular rich person decides that they really love a place and want to revitalize it. The other example that I have in my mind is Dan Gilbert and downtown Detroit. As of 2024, his firm Bedrock was reported to own 131 properties and approximately 18 million square feet of space, making him the largest and most prominent landlord in downtown.
I would also argue that this is the most effective way to do it. Because who is going to give more shits: the person running a fund with a 5-7 year time horizon and an IRR clock, or the intrinsically motivated person with a deep personal attachment to a place who wants nothing more than to see it thrive and succeed? My bet is on the latter. It also doesn't hurt when you strike an all-stock deal with OpenAI for $6.5 billion.
Cover photo by Frames For Your Heart on Unsplash
This is a longstanding joke / criticism among nerds:
Namely, it is the fact that the charging port for Apple's Magic Mouse is on its bottom, meaning, when it's being charged, you can't use it. This would be annoying if you ignored the low battery warnings and let it die in the middle of working on something critically important. And so lots of people think it's a ridiculous design. But is it? Here's an excerpt from a
I know I'm late to the party on this, but I finally tried Apple Vision Pro this weekend. I was in the Apple Store at the Toronto Eaton Center getting the battery replaced in my phone, so I decided to do a demo. And let me tell you -- I was totally blown away. I messaged everyone I knew (after I got my phone back) and told them that they need to try it.
To be clear, though, very few people right now want to actually buy this computing device. Initially, Apple was thinking that it would sell upwards of 800,000 units this year. But now it expects to sell somewhere closer to 400,000. Maybe. The device is too expensive, too bulky, and the use cases just aren't there for someone to feel they need to buy it.
I also found that, when I was looking at the world around me, I could tell I was looking at a video. It wasn't exactly perfect. (Vision Pro creates a mixed-reality experience by recording the world around you and then playing it back to you.) But that's okay. The hardware will get better. The price will come down. And the developer community will build a bunch of killer apps that nobody has even thought of yet.
https://twitter.com/Casey/status/1753848769118970152
None of this changes the fact that the device is still an astonishing technical achievement. The eye tracking works perfectly. All of my hand gestures were flawlessly picked up. And the overall experience was entirely immersive -- from 3D videos (recorded on regular iPhones) to a butterfly landing on my hand and a velociraptor flaring its nostrils right in front of me.
What was most impactful to me is that I could easily imagine a future where all of this works. Is this a more exciting way to watch sports? Yes. I sat courtside and Lebron dunked in my face. Is this a better way to watch movies on a plane? By far. Will this be used to help build buildings and coordinate design & engineering disciplines? Yes, absolutely, among many other things.
It is also easy to imagine how spatial computing is likely to dovetail with other innovations such as AI and blockchains. Mixed-reality or extended reality blurs the line between physical and digital. And in my mind, AI becomes the way in which we will want to interact with this new computing world. (It's not easy to type on a virtual keyboard.)
At the same time, digital artifacts will come to be viewed much differently when they're all blended in. An NFT sitting in a cold wallet is going to feel a lot different than an NFT hanging in a fully immersive 3D gallery that is viewed by millions of people. This strengthens the case for blockchains, and the ownership of digital objects, products, and services.
Maybe this is really far into the future. I don't know. But regardless, if you haven't already, I would encourage you to book a demo at your local Apple Store. However cool and great you think it will be, it will be better. I'm not suggesting you should buy one, but I am suggesting that you need to try it out and see a glimpse into the future.
And if any of you are working on Apple Vision Pro software that is somehow connected to the design and construction industry, I would love to hear from you and learn more about what you're up to. I have complete conviction that this will form the future of our industry. The best place to reach out is here.
Yes, with the charging port on the mouse’s belly, you cannot use it while it charges. There are obvious downsides to that. But those positing the Magic Mouse as absurd act as though Apple doesn’t know this. Of course Apple knows this. Apple obviously just sees this as a trade-off worth making. Apple wants the mouse to be visually symmetric, and they want the top surface to slope all the way down to the desk or table top it rests upon. You can’t achieve that with an exposed port.
This is an argument that feels right. Apple is not the kind of company that makes arbitrary design decisions. And the deliberate decision they have made is that a more perfect design is more important than solving for the few instances where a user was negligent and forgot to charge their mouse. Gruber goes on to say, the "charging port placement is an opinionated design, not an absurd design."
But this then raises another question: Is opinionated design the right approach?
For well over a century, one of the maxims of good design has been that form should follow function. In other words, the shape and design of an object should relate to its intended use. And so, in this instance, if "function" involves using the mouse while it's being charged then maybe, by this criteria, it isn't a good design. Then again, it is a wireless mouse. Maybe Apple doesn't want you to use it while it's charging.
Let's consider another design object that you touch with your hand: Walter Gropius' famous door handle.
Originally designed in 1922, the simple design consisted of a square bar and a cylinder. And its job was to communicate to you that, in order to use it, you should grab the cylindrical part, and not anywhere else. So on this level, the design was responding to its intended use, to our hands. Grab here. But is this truly an example of form following function? It's debatable.
Architect and professor Witold Rybczynski, who I would say generally isn't a fan of modernism, has argued that it's not. His critique of the overall Bauhaus movement -- of which Gropius was the founder -- was that it was actually a design school dedicated to "form follows predetermined aesthetics rather than form follows function."
In some ways, he's right. You can tell when something came out of the Bauhaus, just as you can tell when something is from Apple. There's a particular aesthetic and stubbornness to maintaining it. That's why the Magic Mouse can't be charged while in use and why Apple, equally famously, clung to the simplicity of a single-button mouse. Two just didn't look as nice.
But I see this as an honorable quality. Having an opinion is better than not having one. And there are lots of objects out there without one.
Yes, with the charging port on the mouse’s belly, you cannot use it while it charges. There are obvious downsides to that. But those positing the Magic Mouse as absurd act as though Apple doesn’t know this. Of course Apple knows this. Apple obviously just sees this as a trade-off worth making. Apple wants the mouse to be visually symmetric, and they want the top surface to slope all the way down to the desk or table top it rests upon. You can’t achieve that with an exposed port.
This is an argument that feels right. Apple is not the kind of company that makes arbitrary design decisions. And the deliberate decision they have made is that a more perfect design is more important than solving for the few instances where a user was negligent and forgot to charge their mouse. Gruber goes on to say, the "charging port placement is an opinionated design, not an absurd design."
But this then raises another question: Is opinionated design the right approach?
For well over a century, one of the maxims of good design has been that form should follow function. In other words, the shape and design of an object should relate to its intended use. And so, in this instance, if "function" involves using the mouse while it's being charged then maybe, by this criteria, it isn't a good design. Then again, it is a wireless mouse. Maybe Apple doesn't want you to use it while it's charging.
Let's consider another design object that you touch with your hand: Walter Gropius' famous door handle.
Originally designed in 1922, the simple design consisted of a square bar and a cylinder. And its job was to communicate to you that, in order to use it, you should grab the cylindrical part, and not anywhere else. So on this level, the design was responding to its intended use, to our hands. Grab here. But is this truly an example of form following function? It's debatable.
Architect and professor Witold Rybczynski, who I would say generally isn't a fan of modernism, has argued that it's not. His critique of the overall Bauhaus movement -- of which Gropius was the founder -- was that it was actually a design school dedicated to "form follows predetermined aesthetics rather than form follows function."
In some ways, he's right. You can tell when something came out of the Bauhaus, just as you can tell when something is from Apple. There's a particular aesthetic and stubbornness to maintaining it. That's why the Magic Mouse can't be charged while in use and why Apple, equally famously, clung to the simplicity of a single-button mouse. Two just didn't look as nice.
But I see this as an honorable quality. Having an opinion is better than not having one. And there are lots of objects out there without one.
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