Apple's vice president of product design leaving in February
Tang Tan, Apple's vice president of product design, is leaving the company in February, marking another high-level departure in recent history.
Apple's vice president of product design leaving in February
Sources in the company say that the departure is a blow to the company. Tang was responsible for making critical decisions about many of Apple's products and had substantial influence over the design of iPhone, Apple Watch, and AirPods products.
Tan works directly under John Ternus, senior vice president of hardware engineering.
According to Bloomberg, Apple is reshuffling Tan's duties to handle the transition. Those who worked alongside Tan will have expanded roles, including Richard Dinh, Tan's top lieutenant and head of iPhone product design. Hardware engineer executive Kate Bergeron will take over the design of the Apple Watch.
Tan's departure marks the second learned of this week. On Wednesday, news broke that Steve Hotelling, an Apple executive responsible for innovative technologies used in iPhone, iPad, and even Apple Vision Pro, is retiring from Apple.
Read on AppleInsider
Comments
At some point you accumulate so much wealth that it's not worth the daily grind anymore. I suspect that was the case with Tang, who would have to be worth at least $10M if he managed his money to any reasonable extent.
https://patents.justia.com/inventor/tang-yew-tan
It looks like Apple's the only company he's ever worked at. On LinkedIn, it says he graduated in 1999 and is named on Apple's patents as early as 2000. He finished high school in 1993, likely aged 17-18, so he'd be 47-48 years old now and worked at Apple for 23-24 years.
It says here he's been VP of design for 13 years:
https://www.zoominfo.com/p/Tang-Tan/1670765886
That's a long time to be at a company, Jon Ternus has been there around 22 years and Tim Cook 25 years. After 15 iPhones, there's not much left to do and he's made enough to retire comfortably.
He had a pretty lucky break to start at Apple just after college and stay there his entire career. He's at the same level as Kevin Lynch:
https://theorg.com/org/apple/org-chart/tang-yew-tan
Given how important design is to Apple, I imagine any product design leaders would be quite impactful. Evans Hankey left last year too. It will be interesting to see where iPhone design goes from here and how much different iPhone 20 will be from iPhone 15. They've pretty much peaked every aspect of the design, except the battery.
There's a bit of "oh no, this guys brought Apple all this success, what are they going to do without him?!" in these articles. What could happen is that the new person and new structure may bring new, better and more interesting designs and products. That's just as much a possibility as no new interesting products. Always pluses and minuses.