Jony Ive’s Apple exit has been a ‘long time in the making’
- Apple announced Thursday that its longtime design chief, Jony Ive, would be leaving the company at the end of the year.
- While the news came as a shock to many, a new report from Bloomberg indicates that his departure has been a “long time in the making.”
- In a report from the Apple reporter Mark Gurman, Bloomberg said Ive had disengaged from his role and was in the office as little as twice a week.
- Ive plans to set up his own design company, called LoveFrom, which is expected to count Apple among its clients.
Apple announced the resignation of its famed design chief, Jony Ive, on Thursday after his near-30-year tenure at the company.
The news came as a shock to many, including analysts who described Ive as “irreplaceable” and said his departure would “leave a hole” in the company. Apple’s stock dropped 0.87% on the news, wiping $8 billion from Apple’s market cap.
But Ive’s departure had been a long time in the making. There had been rumblings for years that he could leave after he shifted focus from the day-to-day business of designing Apple’s products.
A new report from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman found that Ive had been “shedding responsibilities” since the launch of the Apple Watch in 2015 and that he came into Apple’s headquarters as little as twice a week.
Sources familiar with the matter told Bloomberg that many of Ive’s meetings moved to San Francisco, where he lives and has an office and studio set up, to avoid his having to make the one-hour commute to Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, California. Other meetings were reportedly held at the homes of his employees or at hotels.
“This has been a long time in the making,” Bloomberg quoted an anonymous person familiar with the matter as saying. “He’s been at Apple over 25 years, and it’s a really taxing job.”
Ive joined in 1992 and is considered to be the mastermind behind Apple’s biggest products, including the iPhone, the iPad, the Apple Watch, the Mac, and the iPod.
He was also a close confidant of Steve Jobs, Apple’s cofounder and former CEO, and reported directly to him.
“Most of the greatest debates at Apple happened between those two as they walked together,” Matt Rogers, a cofounder of Nest Labs who worked on iPhone and iPod software from 2007 to 2010, told Bloomberg.
Jobs and Ive would lunch together regularly and walk around Apple’s headquarters making design decisions together, according to Bloomberg. When Jobs died in 2011, Ive became the most important person at the company, it added.
But his intense stint at Apple had reportedly begun to wear him down. “It’s been an extremely tense 25 years for him at Apple and there’s a time for everyone to slow down,” the person who wished to remain anonymous told Bloomberg.
Ive now plans to set up his own design company, called LoveFrom. Apple is expected to be one of his new clients.
Article by Mary Hanbury