Apple's new CEO John Ternus inherits a gutted design team. Here's how he plans to fix it
Apple's industrial design studio was once the soul of the company, the room where the iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad were dreamed up and where every other team came to rally around the next big thing. A decade later, that room has gone quiet. The studio no longer holds a seat at Apple 's executive table, has less influence than at any point in decades, and has been reduced to a service desk that hands over prototypes and color choices on request. Incoming CEO John Ternus says putting it right is his first job, and he's already started.
The diagnosis comes from Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, whose latest Power On newsletter traces how one of tech's most envied design operations quietly fell apart. Ternus, who takes over from Tim Cook on September 1, is preparing what Gurman calls a major shake-up, and has spent considerable time with the design group well before the title is officially his.
A slow decline that started with Jony Ive 's exitThe slide began in 2015, when Jony Ive stepped back from daily management to become chief design officer. Apple framed it as a promotion. It was really the start of a long drift away from the design-first culture Ive built. He left outright in 2019 for LoveFrom, the firm that now works with OpenAI.
His successor Evans Hankey ran the studio but never got Ive's seat at the executive table. She reported instead to operations chief Jeff Williams, a supply-chain man with no design background, a swap Gurman sums up bluntly: Apple replaced one of the most influential designers in history with its top logistics executive. When Hankey left in 2022, the exits turned into an exodus. Bart Andre, at Apple since 1992, retired. Others scattered to LoveFrom or their own ventures. Hankey went on to cofound io, the startup Ive built and OpenAI later bought for $6.5 billion.
The diagnosis comes from Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, whose latest Power On newsletter traces how one of tech's most envied design operations quietly fell apart. Ternus, who takes over from Tim Cook on September 1, is preparing what Gurman calls a major shake-up, and has spent considerable time with the design group well before the title is officially his.
A slow decline that started with Jony Ive 's exitThe slide began in 2015, when Jony Ive stepped back from daily management to become chief design officer. Apple framed it as a promotion. It was really the start of a long drift away from the design-first culture Ive built. He left outright in 2019 for LoveFrom, the firm that now works with OpenAI.
His successor Evans Hankey ran the studio but never got Ive's seat at the executive table. She reported instead to operations chief Jeff Williams, a supply-chain man with no design background, a swap Gurman sums up bluntly: Apple replaced one of the most influential designers in history with its top logistics executive. When Hankey left in 2022, the exits turned into an exodus. Bart Andre, at Apple since 1992, retired. Others scattered to LoveFrom or their own ventures. Hankey went on to cofound io, the startup Ive built and OpenAI later bought for $6.5 billion.
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