Apple will not be naming a new executive to replace its departing top product designer, vice president of industrial design, Evans Hankey, who won’t be replaced when she leaves the company in the coming months, Bloomberg News reports citing “people with knowledge of the decision.”
Mark Gurman for Bloomberg News:
Instead, the company’s core group of about 20 industrial designers will report to Jeff Williams, Apple’s chief operating officer. The company will also give larger roles to a group of Apple’s longest-tenured designers. Hankey has reported to Williams since taking the job in 2019, when top designer Jony Ive left to start his own firm.
For decades, Apple’s design czars were some of the highest-profile people at the company. Even before Ive became head of design in 1997 — around the time co-founder Steve Jobs returned to Apple — executives like Robert Brunner gained fame for molding the company’s products…
Apple’s design group was broken up in 2015, and Ive stepped back from his day-to-day role at the company. The team was split into industrial design, which covers hardware, and a division handling user interfaces — the look of the company’s software. Hankey has been in charge of industrial design, while Alan Dye continues to lead the other group.
MacDailyNews Take: Uh:
Can no one bother to look at Williams’ and Cook’s ages? They’re nearly identical in age! Tim Cook is 58 years old. Jeff Williams is 56.
Accordingly, we view Williams more as an insurance policy than a successor. If all goes well, by the time Tim Cook retires, Williams will be close to or at retirement age, too. If Cook decides to leave and do something else before retirement age, then Williams is right there, ready to step in for Apple. For Cook, there won’t be the years of succession questions that Steve Jobs faced. – MacDailyNews, August 5, 2019
That group will get larger roles as part of the shift. But Williams decided that none would be named the new head and that the entire team will report to him. That move links Apple’s operations group more closely with design — an arrangement that’s irked some of Apple’s creative staffers. It will also elevate Williams, who is seen as a possible successor to Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook.
MacDailyNews Take: Unsurprisingly, parts-orderers do not understand design, so they do not value it as highly as they should. This too shall pass in the not too distant future, hopefully for the better, not the worse.
To design something really well, you have to get it. You have to really grok what it’s all about. It takes a passionate commitment to really thoroughly understand something, chew it up, not just quickly swallow it. – Steve Jobs
Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service. — Steve Jobs
Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works. – Steve Jobs
Tripp Mickle for The New York Times, May 1, 2022:
It had been nearly three years since Steve Jobs died at the age of 56, and as C.E.O., Mr. Cook had looked to Mr. Ive — the man Mr. Jobs called his “spiritual partner” — to lead product development… In the wake of Mr. Jobs’s death, colleagues said, Mr. Ive fumed about corporate bloat, chafed at Mr. Cook’s egalitarian structure, lamented the rise of operational leaders and struggled with a shift in the company’s focus from making devices to developing services.
Disillusioned with Mr. Cook’s Apple, Mr. Ive would depart five years later, in 2019. His exit would change forever the balance of power at the top of a company long defined by its product ingenuity, leaving it without one of its most creative thinkers and the driving force behind its last new device category…
In Mr. Ive’s absence, Mr. Cook has accelerated a shift in strategy that has made the company better known for offering TV shows and a credit card than introducing the kind of revolutionary new devices that once defined it.
This account of Mr. Ive’s resignation is adapted from a new book, After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul, that I wrote. The book is based on interviews with more than 200 people, including former and current employees at Apple, as well as with friends and former colleagues of Mr. Ive…
[Jobs’ and Ive’s] fast friendship and collaboration contrasted with the evolution of Mr. Jobs’s relationship with Mr. Cook. It took a push from colleagues who feared Hewlett-Packard might poach Mr. Cook for Mr. Jobs to promote to him to chief operations officer in 2005, according to people familiar with the promotion. Mr. Jobs’s decision to later tap Mr. Cook as his successor was motivated in part by the recognition that half of the company’s value came from Mr. Cook’s ability to manufacture and deliver its devices on time. Those skills would be critical to taking the iPhone from sales of 10 million units a year to 200 million.
Even so, Mr. Jobs considered Mr. Ive the company’s second-most powerful executive. He thrust the design team to the forefront of Apple’s product development process, ensuring it played a central role in the iPod, iPhone and iPad…
Mr. Cook seldom visited [Ive’s design] studio… On one of the few occasions he did, it was to see a Leica camera Mr. Ive had helped design for a charity auction. Mr. Ive glowed as he detailed the designers’ work on the camera for Mr. Cook, who nodded expressionlessly. People watching across the studio would later joke that they caught Mr. Cook’s eyes straying from the charity camera to the nearby design tables topped with iPhones, iPads and Macs that the company sold for tremendous profit. He stayed only a few minutes.
SEE ALSO:
• Apple’s famous design team now has no original members left – May 3, 2019
• Another Apple industrial designer leaves company – May 1, 2019
• Significant turnover hits Jony Ive’s famed industrial design team at Apple – April 25, 2019
• Steve Jobs left design chief Jonathan Ive ‘more operational power’ than anyone else at Apple – October 21, 2011
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Yet another organizational staffing mistake made by beancounter Tim Cook.
Steve Jobs made design central and powerful inside Apple. Tim Cook is too stupid to continue an obviously winning formula.
Force the staff to take more diversity, inclusion, and equity training instead, Tim, you overpaid moron.
No. Let’s call it what it is. ‘diversity, inclusion, equity’ are the left’s dog whistles for blatant racism and discrimination. Just like antifa are all fascist terrorists. The left love to mask the evil they do with terms the opposite of what they do.
Call them what they are. Bigoted fascist racists. That is what they are.
I wish Diversity, Inclusion and Equity would just D.I.E. already.
This is a VERY VERY VERY bad sign. Steve warned about when companies are run by sugar water salesmen, ie, marketers and pencil pushers.
We got here way too fast. All those people were around to LEARN those lessons and learned NOTHING.
Total losers. Tim Cook is a disaster and insulated by massive success created by jobs, and has been coasting and burning that success for years. It will not last forever.
The ONLY person with the right mix of tech and long enough history with Steve (being from NeXT) is Craig Federicci.
We have to pray he takes over and maybe there can be a renascence.
The current trajectory of apple is too similar to the skulley era.
I know someone who met Craig recently and said he was acting like a petulant child, “you don’t know who I am?” Phil Schiller is the only one i’d trust to take the helm but he’s halfway out the door. All the generic diversities they push at each event are forgettable nobodies. I hope they at least don’t stick an Indian in there like many other tech companies, they are the worst racists (real ones that even discriminate against their own co-ethnics in different castes, not the fake ones leftists invent).
You know who else was a petulant child? Steve Jobs. Great company. Phil Schiller doesnt couldn’t find his own ass with a road map.
This could save them a bundle coupled with the software design chief engineer they must have gotten rid of a while back.
chatGPT has been doing their software design: “make this OS more inclusive, non-binary and less heteronormative, oh and more gay and pregnant man emojis, Love T.C.”
Geez getting close to hiring Steve Ballmer to run things at this rate.🤪
They don”t need an industrial chef position, they already have a cook in charge
Your joking, right?
Outstanding industrial design is an extraordinarily important factor in the success of Apple products. In fact, its importance cannot be overestimated.
OK, so Jony Ive when back to England to pick up his CBE and he stayed. So? The implication that from now Apple does require an outstanding industrial designer at its helm is, ridiculous!
It is an absolute certainty that there are dozens (many hundreds) of industrial design prodigies in the world. And Apple has the money and the prestige to get one.
So stop crying over spilled milk, and get one.
While in the minority, there are many companies that highly value industrial design. A classic example that immediately comes to mind is the Leica Camera company. They have very similar values of visual simplicity, painstaking attention to detail, and mechanical perfection.
They just search for those industrial designers that have shown they can create products that become recognized as the archetypes of the genre.
Apple needs to do the same.