Jony Ive and Apple split for good

July 13, 2022

Jony Ive and Apple have finally severed ties completely.

Although the designer left Apple in 2019, he was shackled by a golden handcuffs consulting deal that reportedly cost Apple $100 million.

Now both parties have decided not to renew his contract, and Ive is free to work for whomever he pleases.

So far, Ive has done work for Airbnb and Ferrari, and it'll be interesting to see where he lands next.

Most importantly, the severance finally makes it clear that Ive's old Industrial Design team at Apple has been doing stellar work in his absence, but without getting the full credit.

Led by Evans Hankey, a veteran Apple designer and the first woman to lead the studio, the ID team has been undoing some of the mistakes of the recent past, like the MacBook's disastrous butterfly keyboard and Touch Bar.

They've also overhauled the much-hated Apple TV Siri remote and released well-received machines like the Mac Studio. The design of the iPhone 13 isn't too shabby, either.

Now that Ive is gone, it's unlikely Apple will indulge high-end luxury items like a $17,000 gold Apple Watch, which never sat well with me and seemed profoundly anti-Apple. The company always strived to democratize tech, not make it exclusive.

Despite Ive's amazing success at Apple, and his unassailable reputation as this era's leading designer, it'll be interesting to see where Apple design goes without him.

-- Leander Kahney, EIC.

The designer's 30-year partnership with Apple is over. Jony Ive and Apple have reportedly severed ties completely, ending a relationship that spanned more than three decades and resulted in some of Apple’s biggest products, including the iPhone, iMac, Apple Watch, spaceship campus, numerous retail stores and much more.

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One more thing ...

"People say sometimes, 'You work in the fastest-moving industry in the world.' I don't feel that way. I think I work in one of the slowest. It seems to take forever to get anything done. All of the graphical-user interface stuff that we did with the Macintosh was pioneered at Xerox PARC [the company's legendary Palo Alto Research Center] and with Doug Engelbart at SRI [a future-oriented think tank at Stanford] in the mid-'70s. And here we are, just about the mid-'90s, and it's kind of commonplace now. But it's about a 10-to-20-year lag. That's a long time." -- Steve Jobs

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