Jony Ive leaves Apple

News bomb from Apple PR: Apple today announced that Sir Jony Ive, Apple's chief design officer, will depart the company as an employee later this year to form an independent design company which will count Apple among its primary clients. While he pursues personal projects, Ive in his new company will continue to work closely and on a range of projects with Apple. There's a lot to dig into here, but for once, I fully agree with John Gruber's take. First: Wow. There've been rumors for years that Ive had one foot out the door, that his last real interest at Apple was designing Apple Park, not Apple products. But it's something else to see it. This angle that he's still going to work with Apple as an independent design firm seems like pure spin. You're either at Apple or you're not. Ive is out. It makes me queasy to see that Apple's chief designers are now reporting to operations. This makes no more sense to me than having them report to the LLVM compiler team in the Xcode group. Again, nothing against Jeff Williams, nothing against the LLVM team, but someone needs to be in charge of design for Apple to be Apple and I can't see how that comes from operations. I don't think that "chief design officer" should have been a one-off title created just for Jony Ive. Not just for Apple, but especially at Apple, it should be a permanent C-level title. I don't think Ive ever should have been put in control of software design, but at least he is a designer. I don't worry that Apple is in trouble because Jony Ive is leaving; I worry that Apple is in trouble because he's not being replaced. Nothing to add.