Caitlin Kalinowski has built hardware at three of the most consequential tech companies of the last two decades: Apple (MacBook Air, Mac Pro, original unibody MacBook Pro), Meta (every generation of Quest, Rift, and Orion AR glasses, as Meta's first consumer electronics hire), and OpenAI (robotics and hardware teams, built from zero). She left OpenAI to focus on robotics. That resume is the reason this conversation is worth your time.
The most actionable signal in this interview is a supply chain warning: Kalinowski is telling hardware startups to pre-buy memory now, before a price shock hits. She also makes a direct argument that VR's failure to reach mass market was not wasted, because the sensor fusion, optics, and tracking technology built for headsets became the technical foundation for modern defense hardware. Humanoid robots, she says, are still prototypes, and the gating factor is not AI, it is actuator reliability and cost at scale.
The full conversation covers why she left OpenAI, what she learned directly from Jobs, Zuckerberg, and Altman about hardware decision-making, and where she thinks the first real robotics deployments will actually land. The supply chain warning alone justifies reading the source.
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