

One of those executives was Alan Dye, who Apple on Thursday said will become vice president of human interface design. During 2015, Ive handed off some duties to other executives while he finished Apple’s new corporate headquarters, Apple Park.

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Ive came to oversee both hardware and software design at Apple, but the company laid the groundwork for his departure over several years. “When I would see him there, two days a week or more, that just told me he had taken a step back,” Cannistraro said. Around 2015, Cannistraro would often see Ive at a high-end fitness gym on Market Street in San Francisco doing mid-morning workouts. Ive became a symbol of continuity, bridging the Jobs and Cook eras.īut Alan Cannistraro, chief executive of online video discovery platform Rheo who previously worked at Apple for a dozen years, said Apple employees knew Ive had taken on fewer day-to-day design duties in the past several years. Chief Executive Tim Cook, to whom Ive now reports, has not done the same.Īfter Jobs’ death, pundits questioned whether Apple could continue Jobs’ pace of new products. Jobs deeply involved himself in Apple’s design process, sometimes visiting Apple’s design studios daily to offer Ive feedback. “I would view it as Jony Ive looking to get paid market rates for his design expertise from Apple, with the right to allow other companies – not competitors to Apple – to leverage that expertise,” Chokshi said. Nehal Chokshi, an analyst with Maxim Group, said that despite Ive’s key role in Apple history, his departure will not hurt the iPhone maker. Sales of some newer hardware products such as the Apple Watch and its wireless AirPods headphones are expanding, but Apple has turned its attention to growing its services business, which includes Apple Music and iCloud. Ive’s departure comes amid falling iPhone sales, including a record drop in Apple’s most recent quarter. “I have the utmost confidence in my designer colleagues at Apple, who remain my closest friends, and I look forward to working with them for many years to come,” Ive said. Ive’s new company will be called LoveFrom, the Financial Times reported, quoting Ive as saying it would be based in California “for now.” Ive told the newspaper he would work on Apple devices in addition to unspecified “personal passions” and non-Apple projects. Ive joined Apple in 1992 and led Apple’s design teams since 1996. “It’s the most significant departure of somebody who was a core part of the growth story” under Jobs, said Ben Bajarin, analyst with Creative Strategies. Ive spent nearly three decades at Apple, leading the design of the candy-colored iMacs that helped Apple re-emerge from near death in the 1990s to the iPhone, regarded by some experts as one of the most successful consumer products of all time. The company is also in the midst of a pivot away from hardware devices to software services.( Reuters) – Jony Ive, a close creative collaborator with Apple co-founder Steve Jobs whose iPhone and other designs fueled Apple’s rise to a $1 trillion company, will leave later this year to form an independent design company.Īpple said Ive will continue work on its products at his new venture, but shares fell as much as 1.5% to $197.44 in after-market trading, wiping about $9 billion from the firm’s value. Apple’s business is currently weathering many changes: slumping iPhone sales, an increasingly tense trade war between President Trump’s administration and China, the April departure of retail chief Angela Ahrendts. “This just seems like a natural and gentle time to make this change,” Ive said in the interview, somewhat perplexingly. Instead, Alan Dye, who leads Apple’s user interface team, and Evans Hankey, head of industrial design, will report directly to Apple’s chief operating officer, Jeff Williams, according to the Financial Times. Apple will not immediately appoint a new chief design officer. His role took on even greater importance after Apple cofounder Steve Jobs died of pancreatic cancer in 2011.

Ive has been an indispensable leader at Apple and the chief guide of the company's aesthetic vision. The transition will start later this year, and LoveFrom will formally launch in 2020. Jony Ive announced in an interview with the Financial Times on Thursday that he was departing the company after more than two decades to start LoveFrom, a creative agency that will count Apple as its first client. The man who designed the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone-and even the Apple Store-is leaving Apple.
