What Does Jony Ive’s Exit Mean For Apple?

On Thursday, Apple announced that longtime designer Jony Ive will be leaving the company to start an independent design firm. Ive is responsible for many of Apple’s most iconic products over the years, but how deeply will his exit be felt? Here’s what analysts are saying:

At The Verge, Dieter Bohn believes it marks the end of an era at Apple — the era of “singular genius”:

There’s a much more pithy phrase for what Cook is talking about. It’s the phrase for when decisions are made by a consensus from a group instead of by one sole person. That phrase is, of course, “design by committee.”
It’s a damning phrase, so it’s no wonder that Cook avoided it. But make no mistake, that’s what he’s referring to here. It’s a scary thing to consider for Apple, because so much of our idea of what the company is and what it means has been tied up with the idea of a singular genius.
The singular genius is the mythos of how Apple was founded and how it became the global giant it is today.

That said, it may be a few years before we’re truly in a post-Ive world. Apple works on hardware well into the future, and Ive notes in his exit interview with the Financial Times that he has recently completed “some significant projects.”

While the “design by committee” future of Apple may not be the end of the world, John Gruber worries that Apple doesn’t seem to have a good handle on how to restructure the corporate reporting structure:

It makes me queasy to see that Apple’s chief designers are now reporting to operations. This makes no more sense to me than having them report to the LLVM compiler team in the Xcode group. Again, nothing against Jeff Williams, nothing against the LLVM team, but someone needs to be in charge of design for Apple to be Apple and I can’t see how that comes from operations… I don’t worry that Apple is in trouble because Jony Ive is leaving; I worry that Apple is in trouble because he’s not being replaced.

On the other hand, Ben Thompson notes that he called Ive’s departure years ago and that Ive’s level of involvement in Apple’s design process in recent years has probably decreased to the point where his departure will not be a shock to the system (he didn’t even narrate a video at WWDC 2019):

Over the next few years Ive reportedly spent nearly all of his time on Apple Park, the company’s new headquarters, and while Apple says that Ive resumed some of his duties in 2017, both Bloomberg and The Information reported last night that Ive was an increasingly rare presence in Cupertino, spending more time in his native United Kingdom and, even when he was in San Francisco, holding meetings in a design studio built near his house.
And so, when Ive says this is “a natural and gentle time to make this change”, that is because the groundwork has been laid for a long time: occasionally consulting with Apple’s design team is not a significant departure from what Ive’s role has become.

Reporting from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman backs this up, with internal sources saying that Ive has steadily relinquished responsibilities since 2015 in the run-up to his exit:

But after the Watch launched in 2015, Ive began to shed responsibilities. 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. They asked not to be identified discussing private details.

Meanwhile, over at Motherboard, Jason Koebler lays out a less rosy view of Ive’s tenure: one focused on slim, minimal design that’s antagonistic to upgrades and repairs — and terrible for the environment:

Ive’s Apple has been one in which consumers have been endlessly encouraged to buy new stuff and get rid of the old. The loser is the environment, and the winner is Apple’s bottom line. Apple has become famous for its design, and Ive has become famous, too. Let’s hope the next great consumer electronics designer is nothing like him.

At Charg.d, Owen Williams suggests Ive’s departure will indeed mean a shift away from the “sleek at all costs” ethos at Apple (and maybe a fix for those damn MacBook keyboards?):

But, there is no doubt in my mind that him leaving Apple might mean we finally see the return of a practical, use-case focused Apple, rather than a design-details-at-all-costs mission that was largely pushed by Ive internally.
The industrial design department has the most power at Apple, and as the years went on after Jobs’ passing, this began to make people increasingly uneasy internally. Apple has seemed like a very different company in recent years, making decisions that felt perplexing to consumers as it pushed to move up-market—which is certainly traceable to Ive.