When I saw this on Twitter last night, I let out a very loud “Wow!” and surprised my partner who was reading in bed next to me. Jony Ive is leaving Apple after 30 years with the company, and after having designed all of Apple’s iconic products from the iMac to the iPhone, from the MacBook Air to the Apple Watch.
As Mark Gurman points out in a Bloomberg article:
Jony Ive has been leaving Apple Inc. for years
This began after the release of the Apple Watch, and was solidified when “Ive was named Apple’s Chief Design Officer, a role that shifted day-to-day responsibility of the hardware and software design teams to a pair of executives, Alan Dye and Richard Howarth.”
Ive was also named Chancellor of the Royal College of Art in London, and his tenure began in July 2017. The Chancellor is an honorary role, but Ive has participated in many activities at the RCA. And this brought him back to his home country, England.
Ive’s crowning glory is certainly Apple Park, the new spaceship campus in Cupertino, and it’s understandable that he has perhaps gotten bored with the quotidian task of designing the most popular computing device ever made.
Ive will be launching a new company, LoveFrom, together with designer Marc Newson, and their first client will be Apple. They probably won’t do much work for Apple, but this is a soft landing that will not hit Apple’s share price too much.
Ive is one of the iconic designers of computing products, even though his overly minimalist approach can be criticized at times. (Such as removing all traces of color from the macOS Finder, making it drab and utilitarian.) But his influence will live on.