How to ship hardware in the AI era | Caitlin Kalinowski (Apple, Meta, OpenAI)
Caitlin Kalinowski has shipped flagship hardware at three legendary companies — the original unibody MacBook Pro and MacBook Air at Apple, the Quest / Rift / Orion AR program at Meta, and most recently OpenAI's robotics division (which she publicly resigned from over the "department of war" deal). She walks Lenny through why hardware is fundamentally different from software ("we only get to compile four or five times — ever"), the 5-layer supply-chain stack that's been outsourced over 25 years, Palmer Luckey's drones-vs-aircraft-carriers argument, the impulse equation that governs robot safety, the "memory-price meteor" coming for every physical AI startup, and the four hardware design principles she carries from Apple to Meta to OpenAI.
