![]() Today, Apple only has a small handful of veteran senior industrial designers from the Ive era on hand, including Duncan Kerr, Bart Andre, Richard Howarth, Peter Russell-Clarke and Ben Shaffer. So the look of the latest iPhones, iMacs and iPads were devised before Hankey’s tenure began. The length of Hankey’s stint means she didn’t stay long enough to oversee the end-to-end development of a released product. ![]() When Ive left, Hankey made sense as a replacement because she was a longtime engineering manager and design leader who had worked closely with him. The effort to a find a new visionary will likely begin with an internal search, but it won’t be easy to identify the next Jony Ive - or even the next Evans Hankey. There were more pressures and outside distractions.” It wasn’t easy after Steve passed - things started to become a lot more complicated. “The strength of the team was that we were a nucleus bound together by the incredible environment that there was and the things we could do in a fairly unconventional way for a large company,” said a longtime member of the group, who asked not to be identified because the matter is private. That meant a focus on costs rather than purely on look and features. Months before the departures started, Ive touted that only two members of the design team left Apple in the 15 preceding years and that one of the two resigned for health reasons.Įven before Ive left, Apple’s operations department had begun to wield more influence over the design team, people familiar with the matter said. Hankey, who is leaving Apple next spring, isn’t currently planning to join LoveFrom, a person with knowledge of the matter said. Altogether, at least 15 members of Ive’s core senior design team at Apple have exited since 2015. More recently, key team members Jody Akana, Joe Tan, Anthony Ashcroft, Andrea Williams, Jeremy Bataillou and Eugene Whang departed, with the latter four heading to Ive’s firm. That June, Apple announced that Ive would exit to found LoveFrom, a design consulting firm working with Ferrari, Airbnb, Moncler and other brands. ![]() In early 2019, there was another exodus, with key designers Rico Zorkendorfer, Julian Hoenig, Miklu Silvanto and Daniele De Iuliis leaving. Two years later, another top Ive deputy, Christopher Stringer, left to found Syng, a high-end speaker maker. That year, longtime Ive lieutenant Danny Coster departed for GoPro Inc. The departures began when Ive moved to a part-time role - officially known as chief design officer - around the time the Apple Watch launched in 2015. It made the world’s thinnest laptop and convinced people to slap a computer on their wrists. It sold skeptical consumers on the concept that a slab-like phone was better than one packed with buttons. Apple put computers in translucent plastic cases. The idea was to dream up future products, and that they did. But an increased emphasis on costs, along with other distractions, created new difficulties, they say.Īpple’s modern design group started after Jobs’s return to the company in the late ’90s, becoming a roughly two-dozen-person team reporting to Ive. The Apple co-founder had forged a partnership with Ive that helped establish the clean, simple aesthetic that remains the tech giant’s hallmark today. In some ways, the department has been in flux since the death of Steve Jobs more than a decade ago, according to people with knowledge of the situation. Apple also lacks a clear succession plan for the job, a significant problem for a company that sells premium-priced products largely based on their look. Though Hankey had been at the company for about 20 years, her relatively brief tenure at the top of the industrial design team made it hard to establish a distinct vision for new products. And the fate of Apple’s hardware devices, which accounted for more than three-quarters of its nearly $400 billion in revenue last year, hangs in the balance.Įvans Hankey, who has held the job since Ive left, informed Apple last month that she will be departing. Now the department - still in Ive’s shadow - needs a new leader at a time when there are few obvious choices. Legendary design leader Jony Ive departed Apple in 2019, and his replacement for hardware design lasted just about three years. Stocks Skyrocket in Best Post-CPI Day on Record: Markets Wrap US Inflation Slows More Than Forecast, Gives Fed Downshift Room Sam Bankman-Fried’s $16 Billion Fortune Is Eviscerated in Days Musk Warns Twitter Bankruptcy Possible If Cash Burn Lingers Musk’s First Email to Twitter Staff Ends Remote Work has hindered efforts to replace the head of product design, leaving a gaping hole at the helm of a prominent team that’s been key to the iPhone maker’s prolonged success.
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