“Apple Inc.’s close-knit industrial design team is undergoing its most pronounced turnover in decades,” Tripp Mickle reports for The Wall Street Journal. “Rico Zorkendorfer and Daniele De Iuliis, who together have more than 35 years of experience at Apple, decided to leave the company recently, people familiar with the departures said. Another member of the team with a decade of experience, Julian Hönig, plans to leave in the coming months, people familiar with his plans said.”
“The departures of members of the core design team that revived Apple in the 2000s and did the work behind the iPhone, iPad and watch come amid a pause in new products, as the company emphasizes new subscription services this year instead of new gadgets amid slowing iPhone sales,” Mickle reports. “It also follows chief designer Jony Ive’s resumption a little over a year ago of day-to-day oversight for the industrial design group.”
“The ID group was key to resurrecting Apple’s business after co-founder Steve Jobs returned in 1997,” Mickle reports. “Mr. Jobs put the design group at the nexus of Apple’s product development process and lavished attention on the team, visiting it almost daily to see its latest work on new products. The combination of the ID team’s elevated status inside Apple and Mr. Jobs’s treatment helped create a group that worked and socialized together, becoming so tight that only a few members of the team left in more than a decade, according to some of these people.”
Jony Ive stepped “back from day-to-day oversight of ID in 2015,” Mickle reports. “Instead of spending time in the design studio, he devoted much of his attention to designing Apple’s new campus, which opened its doors in 2017. Richard Howarth, a vice president, led the group until Mr. Ive returned in December 2017.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Good luck to Zorkendorfer, De Iuliis, and Hönig! Congrats on jobs very well done as they leave Apple’s industrial design group in very good hands!
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