The Quiet Decline of Design at Apple — and the Man Tasked with Reversing It

There is a quiet tension that runs through Apple’s history — one that outsiders rarely glimpse, but which has shaped every product the company has ever shipped. It is the tension between design and operations: between the people who imagine what a thing should be, and the people who figure out how to build it at scale.

For most of the last decade, that tension has been tilting decisively in one direction. In his latest Power On newsletter, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman traces a slow but unmistakable shift inside Apple — a decade-long erosion of design’s authority, accelerating after Jony Ive’s departure and the exodus of senior design talent that followed, while finance and operations steadily claimed more seats at the table.

The contrast with the Jobs era is stark. Walter Isaacson’s 2011 biography captured it plainly: aside from Jobs himself, Ive held more operational authority than anyone at Apple. Product decisions flowed through the design studio. That was, as Jobs put it, “the structure I built.” Today, there isn’t even a dedicated senior design executive on Apple’s leadership page — Molly Anderson and Steve Lemay were only added to the executive profiles recently, after a conspicuous absence.

Much of this institutional drift happened under the watch of Chief Operating Officer Jeff Williams, who absorbed oversight of the design team after Ive left. It was a structural sign of the times: design reporting into operations, rather than the reverse.

But the narrative may be about to pivot again. John Ternus, who takes over as CEO on September 1, appears intent on restoring design’s centrality. Gurman reports that Ternus has already invested significant time working directly with the industrial design team — well before his official start date — and has been unambiguous about his priorities. “The best-designed products in most people’s hands are Apple products,” Ternus has said. “We’re going to keep it that way. Period.”

Apple’s PR apparatus is already laying the groundwork, positioning Ternus as the driving force behind recent design-led hits like the MacBook Neo. His first major public moment as CEO will come at this fall’s product event, where he is expected to introduce the company’s first foldable iPhone — a product category where design, more than any spec sheet, will determine whether Apple gets it right.

Whether one man can reverse a decade of institutional gravity remains to be seen. But for the first time since Ive’s exit, the signals from Cupertino suggest design might once again be getting the last word.