Losing 20 designers to Jony Ive must be a significant blow to Apple but it’s certainly a testament to Ive’s leadership as a design executive. And now the tech giant loses another senior design executive.
What Ive and his team built at Apple are unquestionably iconic, from the groundbreaking original iMac and its weird puck mouse to the oddly designed Magic Mouse and Lightning Apple Pencil, but with Ive’s and his former team members’ departures, Apple has to rebuilt the design team with new leadership and direction.
With almost none of Ive’s former charges left in the company, Apple’s award winning Ive era is over and if they want to return to that level, it’s going to take a lot of work.
It’s unfortunate that Apple is no longer a design focused company the way it used to be in the 90s to the 2010s having reorganized the team under Operations instead of its own vertical under the CEO but they’ve decided to take this path following Ive’s departure.
This is already a new era at Apple where product design is more iterative and functional than inspirational and if they aim to reclaim their crown as one of the most iconic industrial design companies, it will require a new batch of outstanding designers and design leadership.
AuliaSays 