Back in May 2025, Jony Ive and Sam Altman announced that io Products joined OpenAI.
The team is working on a new kind of product, incorporating OpenAI technology in a new form factor.
Not much is really known about it, just a lot of rumors.
In Episode 640, the ATP podcast team discussed the announcement at length and speculated on what the device could be.
Marco Arment was going for a watch while John Siracusa proposed a potato (or more specifically that if the product delivers on its features, it could be shaped like a potato and still be great).
In Episode 641 they reviewed information that was now available, mainly from the rumor mill.
That includes the fact that it's not a phone, it's not glasses, and Jony Ive was not keen on a wearable device. That device would probably have cameras and microphones for environmental detection.
And this is where the egg form factor idea came from.
After that first mention of the egg, I thought about creating such a device.
But the idea of creating a 3D printed egg with electronics fitted inside made me think it wasn't an appropriate shape.
I then considered an "all-seeing eye pyramid" as both an easier shape to model and an appropriate symbol for a device that would capture your environment. And then I moved on.
But as I was listening to Episode 667, where they discussed the latest news (not much) and reiterated the egg idea, I thought "Why not?".
So let's have a go at creating an egg.
I'll disclose as much information on the project as io Products does.
It's an egg,
it uses Swift as much as possible,
and it's fully open source.
The first step is to model an egg for 3D printing.
After a quick search, I discovered there was ample literature on the subject and many equations available to model an egg.
So I created a SwiftUI-based app to play around with different equations, their parameters, and come up with a shape I liked.
It can generate a 3D model using Cadova, a Swift library made for that purpose.
I based the math in that tool on The Universal Egg Equation and A "universal" formula for egg shape.
The UI can certainly use a little more polish and the code a bit of cleaning.
Xcode reports an issue with threading that needs investigation.
The creation of the 3D model is a work in progress, as it needs to be updated to support adding the electronics.