Apple’s design studio has lost nearly every Jony Ive-era designer. Incoming CEO John Ternus says he’ll fix it.

Apple’s industrial design studio, once the most influential product design operation in the technology industry, has been gutted. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reports that the team no longer has a true seat at the executive table, has less influence and credibility than at any point in decades, and has become a service bureau where other teams come to get what they need and get out.

Incoming CEO John Ternus, who takes over from Tim Cook on September 1, knows the problem. He is preparing a major shake-up of the design organisation and is getting ready to put his firm imprint on the team, according to Gurman’s reporting.

The decline started roughly a decade ago. In 2015, Jony Ive stepped back from day-to-day management to become chief design officer, a move Apple framed as a promotion but which began a slow erosion of the design-first culture that had defined the company since Steve Jobs’s return. Ive left Apple entirely in 2019 to form LoveFrom, a design firm that today works with OpenAI.

For a few years, Apple managed to hold things together. Evans Hankey, who had managed the studio under Ive, took over as head of industrial design. But Apple chose not to give Hankey a seat on the executive team, signalling that design’s role within the company had diminished.

Instead, Hankey reported to Jeff Williams, the chief operating officer, who had no design background.

The arrangement meant Apple had replaced one of the most influential designers in history with its top supply chain executive. That decision, according to Gurman, spoke volumes about how priorities had evolved under Cook.

When Ive’s consulting deal ended in 2022, Hankey left too, triggering a wave of departures that saw nearly every designer from the Ive era defect to LoveFrom, start their own firms, or retire. Bart Andre, Apple’s longest-serving designer who had been with the company since 1992, retired in February 2024. Colin Burns, Peter Russell-Clarke, and Shota Aoyagi all left around the same time.

Hankey went on to cofound io, an AI hardware startup with Ive that OpenAI acquired for $6.5 billion in 2025.

Williams, tasked with stopping the bleeding after Hankey left, chose not to hire a new design leader. He took direct control of the group instead, fearing that elevating one designer over another could trigger even more departures. The exits continued anyway, and at an even faster pace.

The situation became what Gurman describes as a full-blown crisis: morale declining, the studio’s influence shrinking, the historic innovation hub becoming less relevant and powerful. When Williams retired in November 2025, Apple had to confront a question it had long avoided.

The answer was Molly Anderson, an industrial designer known for her work on Apple Watch and her relationship with Hankey. Apple added Anderson to its leadership page as vice president of industrial design in March 2026. The problem, according to Bloomberg, is that Anderson had never managed a team before taking the role, and Apple prioritised continuity over searching for the most accomplished design leader available.

The bench has weakened in parallel. The team is now filled with more junior staffers from school or smaller companies, lacking the depth of globally recognised design leaders it once possessed.

Then came arguably the biggest blow: Alan Dye, who had run user interface design since 2015, left for Meta in December 2025 to become its chief design officer. Several software designers followed him.

The consequences are visible in the products. While Apple has continued updating devices on schedule, the pace of new designs and major form factor changes has slowed. Until last year, the iPhone looked largely the same for about half a decade.

The Apple Watch, AirPods, and Mac have retained essentially the same industrial designs for roughly a decade, with only occasional exceptions like the Watch Ultra and MacBook Neo.

In the Jobs and Ive era, going that long without a significant redesign would have been unthinkable.

Ternus, who comes from Apple’s product engineering and design ranks, has already spent considerable time with the industrial design group since taking oversight of the team in late 2025. He told employees in a recent internal meeting that the company is “going to keep focusing on design, because design is core to what we do at Apple.”

Gurman’s reporting is clear about what needs to happen next: Apple must find a leader capable of restoring the design studio’s prowess, give that person a genuine seat at the executive table, and empower them to rebuild the organisation and deliver breakthrough designs. Getting the right cultural fit will be difficult, but that should not be an excuse to avoid recruiting the best person available.

The challenge for Ternus is that design leadership is just one item on a very long list. Apple trails its competitors in AI, faces enforcement actions under the EU’s Digital Markets Act, and must deliver a foldable iPhone this September alongside the regular lineup. Rebuilding a design culture takes years, and Ternus has weeks before he takes the CEO title.

Whether he can restore design to its former position at Apple while managing everything else will be the defining question of his early tenure. The company has the money, the brand, and the distribution to attract the best designers in the world. What it lacks, for the first time in its modern history, is the internal culture that made those designers want to stay.