August 2019 • Macworld 29NEWS ANALYSISappear to have been a hostile departure, as
Apple’s official press release states that Ive is
forming an independent design company which
will count Apple among its primary clients.
Technically we’re not yet looking at a totally
Jony Ive-free Apple, but it’s easy to get the
impression that we might as well be.
No longer will Ive be one of the main wizards
behind Apple’s curtains. As parody account
@JonyIveParody shows, Ive tends to be Apple’s
public face more than Apple CEO Tim Cook
himself. With any other company, claiming that
one person’s departure could radically change
a company might feel like a stretch, but we’ve
long known that Apple plays by different rules.
With Ive’s departure, the firm finds itself facing its
biggest test since Steve Jobs passed away in 2011.
You could always find some misses in Ive’s
work, but his design philosophy helped create an
aesthetic that was immediately recognizable as
‘Apple’. Core elements of Ive’s design sensitivity
are so familiar that it’s easy to poke fun at them,
whether it’s the focus on aluminium, the rounded
corners, or the smooth, near-buttonless edges
of devices like the Magic Mouse. Virtually all
of the products we know and love from Apple’s
renaissance – roughly 1997 until today – have
Ive’s mind behind them on some level.
Rarely was his work about fluff for the sake of
fluff. His design philosophy worked so well because
there was always utility stirred in with the beauty.
Some of us may complain about the power of a