Jony Ive is leaving Apple

Jun 28, 2019

While everyone was still busy processing all WWDC brought along, in a hot summer day, Apple announced its Chief Designer Officer, Jonathan Ive, is leaving the company.

The news, while totally unexpected, was not without anticipating signs. Mark Gurman writing for Bloomberg reports Ive's involvement with product design has been dwindling since the Apple Watch introduction 4 years ago, in 2015. Around that time Ive had released an interview to the New Yorker saying he had become very tired, was feeling the burden of hard decisions and also willing to spend more time raising his kids closer to where he grew up. From that very article:

According to Clive Grinyer, Ive had by then [2007] considered returning to the U.K., entering a “magnificent early retirement” in which he worked on “luxury items with Marc [Newson].” As Grinyer recalls his conversations with Ive, Apple’s success, and Jobs’s worsening health, revised such plans.

From 2015 to 2017, as a consequence of Ive's promotion to CDO and partial disinvolvement with products to focus on Apple Park and Apple Stores, Apple's board had already been adjusted, promoting two members of the design team, Evans Hankey and Richard Howarth, to VPs reporting to Ive.
Now, Hankey and Dye, another longtime Apple designer, are the ones running the Apple Design team and both report to Jeff Williams, Apple's COO.

As many remain perplexed about this move - a design team reporting to operations? - it actually makes total sense to me giving Apple's current board.
Except for Tim Cook, three I thing are the Senior Vice Presidents who most closely work with the design team: Craig Federighi for software, Dan Riccio for Hardware and Jeff Williams himself for product development.
Williams has been closely working with the design team for many years now, especially on the development of the Apple Watch - as stated in his resumé on Apple Leadership page - meaning he has been in close contact with Alan Dye who is also credited to have worked closely with Jony Ive on the Watch conception.

Lastly, this is how Apple defines its Operations branch:

The Operations team is responsible for driving scale across the global supply chain and accelerating manufacturing innovation, [...]

Having Jeff Williams, a Mechanical Engineer to oversee design and manufacturing innovation makes total sense to me. Now more than even, design is strongly interconnected with manufacturing - with the two departments in a necessary connection since every design innovation must be brought with success to manufacturing and a manufacturing innovation can be started in the design lab.
Design and manufacturing together end also up in how much a product is reliable and behaves, and since Williams also oversees product support and customer service, this could mean a strong interconnection between users' feedback and design process - something the butterfly keyboard should stand as an example to.

Operation's day-to-day business is now been headed by Sabih Khan, longtime Apple employee who will still report to Williams.

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