Apple’s longest-serving senior industrial designer is leaving the company, marking the near-complete turnover of a team once led by Jony Ive, reports Bloomberg.
Bart Andre, who joined Apple in 1992 alongside Ive, told colleagues this month that he is retiring, the article says, quoting unnamed “people familiar with the matter.” Andre was one of the last remaining designers from the Ive era — in fact, he was even at Apple prior to Steve Jobs returning to the helm in the late 1990s.
Andre is the latest member of Apple’s design team to depart. For example, Apple’s (then) head of hardware design, Evans Hankey, announced in October 2022 that she was leaving the tech giant maker three years after taking the job.
Eight-year veteran Milk Silvanto left Apple in 2019 to join Airbnb’s offshoot design studio and is joining the company’s housebuilding initiative. Three other members of the industrial design team — Rico Zorkendorfer, Daniele De Iuliis, and Julian Hönig — also exited the tech giant that year.
Apple’s industrial design team is now led by chief operating officer Jeff Williams. “Having an operations person oversee a division dedicated to design and innovation has rankled some staff,” Bloomberg says. “….cost-cutting measures also have added to the unrest, they said. Under I’ve, the team embarked on exploratory projects that didn’t necessarily have an immediate payoff – something that’s been reigned in.”
Article provided with permission from AppleWorld.Today