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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