Another member of Jony Ive's core design team departs Apple after 32 years

AppleInsider

Bart Andre has been with Apple since 1992, is Apple's longest-serving industrial designer, and intends to leave the company soon.

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There have been several high-profile departures from Apple's design team since Jony Ive left in 2019. Ongoing concerns with a culture change and Jeff Williams at the head of the design team seems to have contributed to some departures.

According to a report from Bloomberg, Bart Andre is the latest design head to depart Apple after 32 years on the design team. He was one of Jony Ive's top lieutenants and helped run things after Evans Hankey left in 2023.

The report suggests there is some "unrest" due to Jeff Williams running the design team and introducing cost-cutting measures. Apple has also allegedly cut back on exploratory projects that Ive was known for when he ran the team.

These concerns seem to be contributing to a kind of "exodus," as the report calls it. Other former Ive team members, including Colin Burns, Shota Aoyagi, and Peter Russell-Clarke, also left recently.

There are a few employees still at Apple who served on Jony Ive's core design team. They are Richard Howarth, Molly Anderson, and Duncan Kerr.

The nature of Andre's departure is unknown, but we're not sure the classification of "exodus" is fitting. Thirty-two years of work in one of the most demanding design jobs in the world may have earned his retirement.



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Kierkegaarden

The nature of Andre’s departure is not unknown — he is retiring.  Shouldn’t the title of the article accurately reflect that?

paisleydisco

Kierkegaarden said:

The nature of Andre’s departure is not unknown — he is retiring.  Shouldn’t the title of the article accurately reflect that?

you're asking AI to rise above click bait blogging. 

citpeks

It's funny how articles like this often suggest that Ive (or his team) was, and is, the only industrial designer that Apple has, or should have.

People move on, like Ive and his former colleagues have, or retire, like this guy is doing.

The Apple aesthetic isn't any kind of secret sauce that only Ive, or his original team, can create, or build upon.

If anything, Ive's departure turned out to be a good thing, with a return to usable keyboards, and thought given to practicality, not just sleekness or thin objects d'art.

The recent story about Ive's desire to kill the MacBook Air perfectly illustrated his limits; as an industrial designer, not a product manager.  Nor software UX designer, as iOS 7 proved.

He did great things for Apple, but Ive wasn't god.

Ive himself was the hungry new blood that Apple needed at the time to move the company forward.  If he, or his cohorts, don't move aside, or haven't developed junior designers to follow the same path than he did, and keep Apple evolving, then that in itself would have been a failure on his part.

chasm

Kierkegaarden said:

The nature of Andre’s departure is not unknown — he is retiring.  Shouldn’t the title of the article accurately reflect that?

The headline is completely accurate — it says he is leaving the company after 32 years. It says nothing in the headline about “unknown” reasons, only at the very end of the article — and the writer immediately suggests that while Andre’s reasons for going weren’t announced, retirement was the most likely explanation.

It seems like your troll imagination is what appears to be inaccurate … for “unknown” reasons …

Kierkegaarden

chasm said:

Kierkegaarden said:

The nature of Andre’s departure is not unknown — he is retiring.  Shouldn’t the title of the article accurately reflect that?

The headline is completely accurate — it says he is leaving the company after 32 years. It says nothing in the headline about “unknown” reasons, only at the very end of the article — and the writer immediately suggests that while Andre’s reasons for going weren’t announced, retirement was the most likely explanation.

It seems like your troll imagination is what appears to be inaccurate … for “unknown” reasons …

The last paragraph of the article begins with “The nature of Andre's departure is unknown”.  The article is largely citing another source that implies turmoil was behind the departure, which is false.  An accurate headline should have read “[name] set to retire after [x] years”.  A departure from one company usually means the arrival at another company.