Did Apple Make An Expensive Mistake By Letting Jony Ive Go?

Six years after Jony Ive walked away from Apple, the company’s product design hasn’t exactly fallen off a cliff, but it hasn’t turned many heads either.

Ive, the design visionary behind the iPhone, iMac, iPod, AirPods, and Apple Watch, left in 2019 to start his firm, LoveFrom. Since then, Apple has leaned harder into incremental upgrades, thicker hardware, and—for the first time in a while—criticism about aesthetics.

Now, questions are being raised: Did Apple lose more than just a designer? Did it lose its creative spark?

But before we dive into this, we first need to understand what the design legend means for the Apple community and the tech world.

Legacy: From Iconic Apple Hits To Head-Scratching Misses

The man behind the iMac and iPhone left an indelible mark on tech design — but not every product was a masterpiece.

Biggest Hits: 

iMac G3 (1998): The translucent, colorful all-in-one with a CRT display marked Apple’s rebirth. Designed for the internet age, it shipped with a 56k modem, USB ports, and a bold Bondi Blue shell, priced at $1,299. Ive and Steve Jobs' first major collaboration was both a design and commercial triumph.

iPod (2001): The device that made Apple a household name. While not an instant hit, its scroll wheel, minimalist form, and 5GB storage won fans over time. It took four generations before the iPod dominated portable music, but its influence was profound.

iPhone (2007): A touchscreen phone with no keyboard? Ive’s bold design redefined the category. Despite no 3G or App Store at launch, the original iPhone’s clean interface and capacitive screen made it a design classic — and the foundation of Apple’s modern success.

MacBook Air (2008): Unveiled from a manila envelope, this impossibly thin laptop drew gasps. Though the first version was underpowered, it created the ultrabook category and set the design benchmark for portable computing.

Notable Misses: 

Butterfly Keyboard (2015): A quest for thinness led to a fragile keyboard that broke from dust and required costly repairs. Despite multiple revisions, it was widely reviled and eventually abandoned in favor of a redesigned scissor mechanism.

Magic Mouse 2 (2017): The sleek surface design was marred by one baffling flaw: a charging port on the bottom, making the mouse unusable while plugged in. Beautiful but impractical.

iPhone 5C (2013): A colorful, plastic-bodied iPhone aimed at the budget market flopped. Sharing internals with the iPhone 5 but lacking Touch ID, it failed to excite consumers, who flocked instead to the premium iPhone 5S.

3D Touch / Force Touch (2015): An ambitious attempt to add pressure-sensitive input across devices. The feature floundered on iPhones due to poor discoverability. Most users didn’t know it existed, and Apple quietly phased it out.

Why He Left

According to a 2022 New York Times piece based on Tripp Mickle’s book “After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul,” Ive stepped down after growing disillusioned with Apple’s shift away from its design-first ethos.

The report highlighted Ive’s deep creative partnership with Jobs and their collaboration on products like the original iMac. Jobs frequently visited the design studio, finding comfort and inspiration in Ive’s presence.

But after Jobs’ passing and Tim Cook taking the helm, things changed. Cook reportedly showed less enthusiasm for design, rarely visiting the studio, even during the development of major products like the Apple Watch, leaving Ive increasingly disconnected from the company’s direction.

What Changed Since Then

Apple still sells hundreds of millions of iPhones, but design-wise, the company hasn’t been turning heads the way it used to. For instance, the company’s first technological breakthrough in ages, Vision Pro, could not succeed commercially, and one of the reasons was its bulky form.

Meanwhile, iPhones keep improving under the hood—but visually, they’ve grown repetitive. As one Redditor put it in 2022: iPhone 11 brought a new look. iPhone 12? Same, but with a Ceramic Shield. iPhone 13? Just rearranged cameras. “I swear to Jobs, if the iPhone 14 looks the same, I’m going to lose it.” (And they might have)

Even Apple’s latest MacBooks—once benchmarks of design—are now facing questions over whether function is overtaking form.

Meanwhile, Ive has partnered with Airbnb, Ferrari, and now OpenAI, helping design a mysterious consumer AI device. The ChatGPT-parent is reportedly set to acquire Ive’s startup, LoveFrom, in a deal valued at nearly $6.5 billion.

The man who once obsessed over the curvature of a chamfered edge is still building the future, just not at Apple.

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