Jony Ive’s former design team is nearly all gone from Apple, has it mattered?

1 month ago 9

It’s hard to talk about Apple design without mentioning Jony Ive. But years after Ive’s departure from Apple, most of his former team is now gone too. Has it really mattered?

Apple’s waning Jony Ive influence

Jony Ive is no longer an Apple consultant

Jony Ive started working at Apple in 1992, and became head of the industrial design team just five years later. Ive and his team were responsible for most of the iconic designs Apple is known for today, including these products:

iMac
iPod
iPhone
MacBook Air
iPad
AirPods
Apple Watch

Ive was in charge of design during Apple’s last couple decades of massive growth, all the way up until the 2019 announcement that he’d be leaving the company.

It’s been five years since then, and the vast majority of Ive’s former team have similarly moved on from Apple.

Mark Gurman recently wrote:

Nearly all of the Apple designers who reported to [Ive] have either retired or taken other jobs — with many heading over to LoveFrom. The exodus has included Ive’s replacement at Apple, Evans Hankey, as well as Tang Tan, the former head of product design for the iPhone within the hardware engineering group.

Hankey’s departure was announced two years ago, and she’s been gone for about 18 months. Tan has been gone just since this February.

Notably, Alan Dye is still at Apple leading Human Interface Design. But his specialty leans heavier into software than hardware

Apple design since Ive’s departure

So what difference have all these shakeups in the industrial design team made?

In some respects, it’s hard to say this early on.

Ive has been gone a while, but his deputies have not.

A product’s design is typically years in the making before a public launch. So while Ive’s direct guidance is likely no longer impacting modern products, that of Hankey, Tan, and others certainly is.

But let’s consider some trends we’ve seen emerge in the years since Ive departed.

At one point during Ive’s tenure, Apple was heavily focused on making its products thinner and lighter, with fewer ports. One fruit of this was the infamous butterfly keyboard and reduction of ports across the MacBook and MacBook Pro especially.

Then 2021 saw a reversal. Two years after Ive left, we got a new MacBook Pro design that famously was unashamed of its bulk, weight, and number of ports. Around the same time, the weight and heft of iPhones started to creep up, as battery life was prioritized over being thin and light.

And of course, there’s also the Vision Pro, a product criticized by many for being too heavy and bulky.

Ive was involved in the Vision Pro’s development, but it’s notable that the product launched years after his departure. That makes it very difficult to know how much the final product does, or does not, reflect his work.

Shifting trends: back to thin and light

Curiously, in the past year or so, we’ve started to see yet another shift.

Apple’s design team is prioritizing thinness and lightness yet again—and seems set to continue doing so.

Last year’s flagship iPhone, the 15 Pro, was substantially lighter than previous models.

Earlier this year, the M4 iPad Pro debuted as Apple’s thinnest product ever, and it’s extraordinarily light too.

The Apple Watch Series 10 also got much thinner than previous models.

Next year’s iPhone 17 Air is expected to take thinness and lightness to a radical new level. And reportedly, similar changes are in store for other Apple products.

So what’s happening?

On one hand, improvements in both hardware and software have enabled Apple to create thin and light devices with fewer compromises than before.

But it also seems like Apple’s current design team, very few of whom worked under Ive, are nevertheless running his playbook again. It’s as if the next generation of Apple designers is seeking to carry the torch and stay true to his influence.

From the outside looking in, that’s what it appears at least. But only those inside can share what’s really happening.