TL;DRApple’s design team has been hollowed out since Jony Ive left. Incoming CEO John Ternus says a major shake-up is coming before he takes over in September.
Apple’s industrial design studio, once the most influential product design operation in the technology industry, has been gutted. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reports that the team no longer has a true seat at the executive table, has less influence and credibility than at any point in decades, and has become a service bureau where other teams come to get what they need and get out.
Incoming CEO John Ternus, who takes over from Tim Cook on September 1, knows the problem. He is preparing a major shake-up of the design organisation and is getting ready to put his firm imprint on the team, according to Gurman’s reporting.
The decline started roughly a decade ago. In 2015, Jony Ive stepped back from day-to-day management to become chief design officer, a move Apple framed as a promotion but which began a slow erosion of the design-first culture that had defined the company since Steve Jobs’s return. Ive left Apple entirely in 2019 to form LoveFrom, a design firm that today works with OpenAI.
For a few years, Apple managed to hold things together. Evans Hankey, who had managed the studio under Ive, took over as head of industrial design. But Apple chose not to give Hankey a seat on the executive team, signalling that design’s role within the company had diminished.
