Reggie James launches Hardware book 2024: an artbook covering the new wave of physical computing

Summary

Reggie James, coming off the acquisition of his company Eternal, is launching Hardware Book 2024 — a 260-page hardcover artbook documenting the current wave of physical computing, co-created with Julian Davis and Charlene Deng. It covers Humane, Rabbit, Teenage Engineering, Daylight, and others, with an exclusive interview with Jesper, the founder of Teenage Engineering. The book is available now at hardwarebook2024.com. A 2025 edition is already in progress.

The launch is a side project, but James's broader thesis is that hardware is entering a genuinely new era — the containers for software are shifting toward spatial and physical form factors, and 2024 felt like the first year that was legible in product form.

OpenAI x Jony Ive

James argues the OpenAI hardware play, anchored by Jony Ive, has to compete by zagging away from Apple's values rather than meeting them head-on. Apple can't credibly ship a device that listens to you 24/7 given existing privacy perception. That's the opening. His best guess at the product is a puck-style device — portable enough to carry, stationary enough to sit on a desk — optimized for fast ChatGPT access rather than replacing the phone. He's skeptical of foldables as a differentiator, calling them squarely inside Apple's design value system.

On Humane, James's diagnosis is that the team was animated by guilt about the iPhone rather than a clear affirmative vision. The laser projector was a key mistake, and the retreat from phone replacement left the device without a coherent identity. He believes OpenAI and Ive have internalized that lesson — their stated position is a third device that lives in your pocket without trying to displace the phone.

The more cynical read: the Jony Ive partnership functions partly as a fundraising instrument. James's hot take is that Sam Altman can walk into a Gulf sovereign fund meeting with Ive, name a ship date, and unlock another $200 billion without needing to discuss model benchmarks. At that capital scale, supply chain complexity — the kind that required a Tim Cook to solve in the 2000s — becomes solvable by acquisition. "Buy Foxconn" is the punchline, but the logic underneath it is real.

Apple Vision Pro

James owns a Vision Pro and his verdict is that Apple chose the wrong guiding metaphor — a floating iPad for solitary use — when the more compelling anchor was something closer to the iPod: an isolating device whose campaign showed you as animated and expressive, not static on a couch. He'd have positioned it around Apple TV and Apple Fitness, kept the use case narrow, and made it as light as possible. The current version tries to be a developer platform and a consumer device simultaneously, at a price that makes bootstrapping developer adoption nearly impossible.

His broader critique of Apple's current creative direction: the company that once positioned its products around becoming your best self is now advertising Apple Intelligence with a guy asking AI to write an excuse email to his boss. Genmoji gets the same treatment — the product's actual value is the process of making a niche in-joke for a friend, but Apple's campaign showed decontextualized end results plastered on billboards, which communicates nothing.

The camera bump, James argues, is a post-Steve artifact of stakeholder management. When Jobs was alive, a single yes in a room was sufficient. Without that authority concentrated in one person, Jony Ive had to negotiate with the camera team, manufacturing, and Tim Cook — and stopped winning every tradeoff.

Glasses and what comes next

James is bullish on glasses as a form factor over a 5-to-10 year horizon. He points to Meta's Ray-Bans as a direction that will keep thinning, and flags XReal's Air glasses — which provide a static heads-up display without full spatial tracking — as something that solves 90% of the practical use case today, particularly for passive viewing. No major tech company has publicly committed to that narrower path, but he thinks it's a viable near-term product.

He's also investing in and advising early AI hardware companies, and flags Palmer Lucky's Chromatic handheld — sold out at launch, supports emulators, and recently added Twitch streaming over USB-C — as a product worth watching in the retro hardware category.