The End of the Ive Era

Great piece by John Gruber on Jony Ive leaving Apple and the end of the Ive era at Apple:

I think Tim Cook is a great CEO and Jeff Williams is a great COO. But who’s in charge of product design now? There is no new chief design officer, which, really, is what Steve Jobs always was. From a product standpoint, the post-Jobs era at Apple has been the Jony Ive era, not the Tim Cook era. That’s not a knock on Tim Cook. To his credit, Tim Cook has never pretended to be a product guy, which is exactly the hubris that John Sculley succumbed to back in the early ’90s, leading to the Newton being launched far before it was ready and the Macintosh platform languishing.

My gut sense for years has been that Ive without Jobs has been like McCartney without Lennon. Or Lennon without McCartney — take whichever analogical pairing you prefer. My point here is only that the fruit of their collaborations were, seemingly magically, far greater than the sums of the duos’ talents and tastes.

Assuming Ive’s exit has been planned for a while, it makes little sense to me that Apple’s new design leaders (Hankey and Dye) are reporting to Jeff Williams, the company’s chief operating officer – unless Apple has bigger plans for him in the near future. Then again, Gruber’s point still holds: who’s Apple’s Chief Design Officer now?