Apple Enters the AI Hardware Race With a Wearable Pin

Apple is developing an AI-powered wearable pin that could ship as early as 2027, secondo The Information, marking the company’s first foray into standalone AI hardware and a direct response to OpenAI’s own device ambitions.

The device resembles a slightly thicker AirTag with an aluminum-and-glass shell. It packs two cameras—one standard and one wide-angle—plus three microphones, a speaker, and a physical button. Like OpenAI’s planned device, it eschews a traditional screen in favor of ambient interaction through voice and sensors.

Apple’s timing is telling. The report landed just two days after OpenAI’s Chief Global Affairs Officer Chris Lehane disse ad Axios that the company remains “on track” to unveil its first AI hardware in the second half of 2026. That device, designed by former Apple design chief Jony Ive through OpenAI’s $6.5 billion acquisition of his startup io, has been described as pocket-sized, contextually aware, and completely screenless.

Reactive or Strategic?

The conventional read on Apple’s move is that Cupertino got caught flat-footed. The company reshuffled its AI leadership last year after Apple Intelligence failed to generate the iPhone upgrade cycle investors expected. It struck a partnership con Google to power its revamped Siri with Gemini—a move characterized as “temporary” while Apple builds its own foundation models.

But there’s another interpretation: Apple is doing what it has always done, letting others validate the market before entering with superior hardware execution.

The Humane AI Pin provided a cautionary tale. That $699 device, built by former Apple employees, launched in 2024 to brutal reviews and fewer than 10,000 unit sales. By February 2025, it was dead—sold to HP for $116 million. The lesson wasn’t that AI wearables are doomed; it’s that the technology and use case weren’t ready for prime time.

Apple’s 2027 timeline suggests the company is betting that the foundational AI capabilities—low-latency language models, reliable voice recognition, on-device inference—will mature over the next 18 months. If the new Siri chatbot Apple plans to unveil in iOS 27 actually works, the pin becomes a natural extension of an ecosystem 1.5 billion iPhone users already inhabit.

The Stakes of the AI Hardware Race

OpenAI has set ambitious targets: Industry projections suggest AI wearables could reach 100 million annual shipments. That’s aggressive for a company that has never manufactured consumer hardware—and one reportedly still wrestling with device personality, data privacy, and computing infrastructure challenges.

Apple, by contrast, has shipped over 3 billion iPhones. Its supply chain relationships run decades deep. It controls the silicon, the operating system, and the services layer. If AI wearables become a real category, Apple possesses structural advantages that OpenAI will struggle to replicate even with Ive’s design expertise.

The aggressive AI acquisitions reshaping the industry—OpenAI’s io purchase, Meta’s $2 billion Manus deal—reflect a shared conviction that the smartphone interface has reached its limits. Silicon Valley is betting that AI needs new form factors to deliver on its ambient computing promise.

Apple’s entry validates that thesis while raising the competitive stakes considerably. The company that defined the smartphone era clearly believes AI hardware represents the next platform shift worth fighting for.

The Information cautioned that Apple’s project remains in early stages and could still be canceled. That’s true of most Apple hardware—the company famously prototypes dozens of products that never reach consumers. But the reporting itself signals that Apple is taking the category seriously enough to commit engineering resources.

For users, the competitive dynamic is encouraging. OpenAI’s device ambitions have now forced a response from the world’s most valuable company. Whether you end up wearing an Apple pin or an OpenAI gadget, the giudizio umano required to make AI assistants genuinely useful will be tested against devices designed by two very different organizations—one that built ChatGPT, and one that built the iPhone.

That’s a race worth watching.