![]() The designer also used to report directly to Jobs. Ive reported to Apple Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook. ![]() “The design team is made up of the most creative people, but now there is an operations barrier that wasn’t there before,” one former Apple executive said. While Williams is a talented executive, some people familiar with matter believe the shift is another sign of Apple becoming more of an operations company. Hankey and Dye will report to Jeff Williams, Apple’s chief operating officer. Hankey is a great team leader, but Apple now lacks a true design brain on its executive team, which is a concern, a person familiar with the design team said. Now that Ive is officially leaving, longtime studio manager Evans Hankey will run the hardware design group, Apple said. And some people familiar with Apple are already worried about the new design leadership. Initially, not much will change, because Apple has been operating with partial input from Ive for a few years, someone close to the team said.īut challenges loom. It’s been an extremely tense 25 years for him at Apple and there’s a time for everyone to slow down.” “He’s been at Apple over 25 years, and it’s a really taxing job. “This has been a long time in the making,” according to one of the people, who asked not to be identified because they aren’t authorized to discuss personnel moves. He occasionally missed out on Apple product launch events, an unthinkable absence several years ago. Ive also traveled frequently to London, near where he was raised. The design executive even set up an office and studio in San Francisco to do much of his work. Ive sometimes met with his team at the homes of his employees, at hotels, or other venues. That helped him avoid the long commute from his home in the Pacific Heights district of the city to Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, California. Ive still only came to the office a couple of days a week, with many meetings shifting to San Francisco, according the people familiar with the matter. They asked not to be identified discussing private details. Day-to-day oversight of Apple’s design team was reduced to coming to headquarters as little as twice a week, according to people familiar with the matter. Many of their spouses worked as designers, too.īut after the Watch launched in 2015, Ive began to shed responsibilities. He was in charge of a roughly two-dozen person design team that included artists whose passions extended to the development of surfboards, cars, and even DJing on weekends. When co-founder Steve Jobs died in 2011, Ive became the most important person at the company, ultimately deciding what products Apple would launch, how they would function, and what they would look like. Ive was the mastermind behind the designs of the iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Mac, and iPod that took Apple from the brink of bankruptcy in the late 1990’s to its status as a trillion-dollar company. ![]() “This news only adds to the current agita around the Apple story,” Dan Ives, an analyst at Wedbush Securities, wrote in a note to investors on Thursday. But the stock has fallen more than 10% since early October on concern about waning iPhone demand and the U.S.-China trade war. One person close to Apple captured the anxiety of the moment: “People who have been there forever don’t want to keep doing incremental updates to current products.”Īpple shares slipped less than 1% in extended trading. Now, the company needs another hit, but this one will require fundamental technological innovation, not just the design genius of Ive and his team. More recently, the company has focused on iterations of its existing lineup. The days when Apple could reliably deliver a whole new category of device - a spare music player, a sleek tablet, an elegant smartphone - every few years have waned. At least six members of the group have left in the past three years. Ive led a stable, close-knit team of designers who created the slick look and feel of Apple’s hardware and software for more than two decades. When it was finally made official on Thursday, there was nevertheless hand-wringing about the company’s future. (Bloomberg) - Jony Ive has been leaving Apple Inc.
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