DESIGN INTELLIGENCEJune 24, 2026·Mary · DEPIX Design Intelligence

Apple gutted the design studio that made it Apple.

Name: Depix
Price: 49 USD

The most beautifully designed object most people own is still an Apple product. The studio that made it that way has, by Apple's own internal admission, been hollowed out — and the man inheriting the company in September is racing to rebuild it before the absence shows up in the product.

On 21 June 2026 Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reported that Apple's industrial design group — for two decades the single most influential product-design operation on earth — has lost nearly every designer of the Jony Ive era and now functions, in the words of people inside it, as a "service bureau": a place other teams come to get what they need and leave, stripped of the authority it once held to set the direction of the whole company. Incoming CEO John Ternus, who takes over on 1 September, is said to be preparing a shake-up to hand design back its seat at the table.

This is not a styling story. It is the clearest case study in years of what happens to a product when the design decision migrates away from the people trained to make it — and why getting that decision right, early and visibly, is the entire game.

How a studio empties out

The departures read like an inventory of an institution dismantling itself one signature at a time.

●Jony Ive left in 2019 to found LoveFrom, the consultancy he now runs with a small Apple-alumni circle.
●Evans Hankey, who inherited Ive's hardware-design leadership, departed in 2022 when Ive's consulting deal lapsed; she has since co-founded the hardware venture io alongside Ive.
●Bart Andre, a designer at Apple since 1992 and a name on a vast share of its patents, retired in February 2024 after 32 years.
●Colin Burns, Peter Russell-Clarke and Shota Aoyagi all left in the same 2024 window.
●Alan Dye, who had run Apple's human-interface (software) design since 2015, left in December 2025 to become chief design officer at Meta — and several software designers followed him out the door.

What replaced them, per the reporting, is a thinner bench of more junior staff recruited from school or smaller firms. In March 2026 Apple named Molly Anderson vice president of industrial design — but Bloomberg notes she had never managed a team before stepping into the role, and that Apple "prioritised continuity over searching for the most accomplished design leader available." The org chart was filled. The authority was not refilled.

The real shift: who holds the pen

The headline isn't the names that left. It's where the decision went after they did.

Under Ive, design held authority comparable to the CEO's — the studio could veto, redirect, and set the terms a product had to meet. After Ive, oversight passed to operations and finance leadership; design oversight at one point sat under former COO Jeff Williams rather than a dedicated design executive. Gurman's framing is blunt: "the influence of the design team waned at the executive levels in the Cook era." The people costing and shipping the product began to outrank the people shaping it.

That is the quiet mechanism behind a thousand "it just doesn't feel like them anymore" complaints — about any company, not only Apple. When the design decision stops being a first-class decision and becomes a service request, the product doesn't get visibly worse on day one. It gets consensus-shaped: defensible, optimised, on-time, and slowly indistinguishable from everyone else's. The cost is invisible in every review meeting and obvious two years later on the shelf.

Why Ternus is moving now

Ternus has spent a striking amount of his pre-CEO transition embedded with the industrial-design group, and he is positioning design as central rather than downstream. To employees he reportedly framed it simply — Apple is "going to keep focusing on design, because design is core to what we do." Publicly: "the most beautifully designed thing that most customers own is an Apple product. We're going to make sure that stays the case."

The tell is the timing. He is trying to restore the studio's authority before his first headline products — a foldable iPhone among them — rather than after a reception goes badly. He understands that you cannot bolt taste back onto a program once the molds are cut and the launch date is locked. The decision has to be central while it is still cheap to change.

The design-intelligence reading

Strip away the Apple specifics and you are left with the founding problem of every design organisation: the most expensive decisions are made when the design is cheapest to alter, and judged by whoever happens to hold the pen at that moment. Lose the senior judgement that used to sit in that room, and you don't get an error you can see — you get a slow regression to the safe and the same.

This is exactly the gap DEPIX builds for. Design Intelligence isn't an image generator; it's a way to keep the design decision central, legible, and arguable at the concept phase — to put a photoreal, decision-grade version of each direction in front of the people who have to choose, so the call is made by judgement in the room and not by whoever's process is loudest. A studio that loses its leaders loses its institutional taste. The answer isn't to mourn the org chart — it's to make the decision quality itself something a team can see, compare, and defend, every time, no matter who is holding the pen.

Apple is about to spend a great deal of executive energy proving the cost of letting design slip from a decision to a service. The lesson is cheaper to learn before that happens than after.