Meanwhile, he appeared at Apple events as a disembodied voice narrating videos about the materials that went into the company’s products. Ive began taking on unusual design projects outside his work at Apple, ranging from a Christmas tree for a London hotel lobby to an all-diamond ring that sold at auction for $256,000, with the proceeds going to charity. He took back some of those responsibilities in 2017, though this clearly proved to be short-lived. In 2015, Ives was promoted to chief design officer and took a step back from day-to-day managerial duties while working on the construction of Apple’s massive new spaceship campus. According to multiple reports, Ive wasn’t as engaged after that and showed up to the office less. The last major new hardware release from Ive and his team was the Apple Watch, which debuted nearly five years ago. ![]() As a result, the next few years for Apple may be defined more by the success or failure of new credit cards and original television shows than by the hardware products Ive helped create. Yet Ive’s departure coincides with a very public push from Apple to convince investors to focus on the potential of services like Apple Music and Apple Pay at a time when its core iPhone business is in decline. And industrial design has long been the soul of Apple itself.Īpple CEO Tim Cook, left, and chief design officer Jonathan Ive look at the Mac Pro in the display room at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in San Jose, Calif. “He was the soul of Apple’s industrial design,” Tim Bajarin, a longtime Apple analyst, told CNN Business. With Ive’s departure and Jobs’ passing, Apple’s two key tastemakers are no longer working at Apple. It only needed to convince customers that they were buying the best and most stylish hardware products on the market. It didn’t need to be first to a product category - and it certainly didn’t need to be the cheapest or the easiest to repair. Now that future may once again be in doubt.Īpple didn’t just sell hardware, it sold taste. It was hard enough to picture Apple without Jobs after the visionary founder’s death in 2011, but the continued presence of the design guru Jobs considered his “spiritual partner” helped mute some of the concerns about the company’s future. “Ive is leaving a hole in the company and is clearly irreplaceable,” he said. Dan Ives (no relation, obviously), an analyst who tracks Apple for Wedbush, called the announcement a “surprise” to Wall Street in an investor note Thursday, as evidenced by the company losing billions in market value overnight. Ive’s departure was somehow both long rumored and still a shock to Apple watchers. (Photo by Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images for WIRED25 ) Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images SAN FRANCISCO, CA - OCTOBER 15: Jony Ive attends WIRED25 Summit: WIRED Celebrates 25th Anniversary With Tech Icons Of The Past & Future on Octoin San Francisco, California. “You’re either at Apple or you’re not,” John Gruber, a prominent Apple blogger, wrote in a post on Thursday. Both parties appeared to try to cushion the blow by stressing that Ive would be starting his own design firm with Apple as one of its primary clients. ![]() Apple announced Thursday that Ive is leaving Apple after nearly 30 years with the company. Together, they pushed out a remarkable string of hit hardware products, starting with the candy-colored iMacs and continuing with the iPod, iPad and Apple (AAPL) from the brink of bankruptcy in the 1990s and made it the first trillion-dollar business in history. ![]() The two formed a close friendship and design partnership that took Apple Instead, Jobs immediately saw the potential of Ive’s work. Ive even had a resignation letter ready in his pocket. “He came over to the studio, I think, essentially to fire me,” Ive recalled in “Becoming Steve Jobs,” a biography of the late Apple CEO. Thousands of employees were laid off in 1997, the year Jobs came back.Īgainst that backdrop, Jobs paid a visit to Apple’s design studio, where Ive was only recently put in charge. Jobs, who had just made his triumphant return to Apple, was in the process of slashing the company’s bloated product line to focus the company for the future. ![]() When Jony Ive first met Steve Jobs, Ive expected to be fired.
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