"And I will grab the award from there hands, like this here..."
In the wake of yesterday’s announcement that Apple Design Chief Jony Ive would be leaving the Cupertino firm to strike out on his own, comes details about Ive’s day-to-day involvement at the company in recent years.
Bloomberg‘s Mark Gurman reports that after the Apple Watch launched in 2015, began relinquishing his responsibilities, due to the strain of the job.
Around that time, Ive told the New Yorker that he was “deeply, deeply tired,” and that the year leading up to the Apple Watch’s debut was “the most difficult” since he joined Apple.
To convince Ive to hang around, Apple agreed to change his official role to Chief Design Officer, which transitioned day-to-day responsibility of the hardware and software design teams to shift to executives Alan Dye and Richard Howarth.
Following that move, Jony Ive began coming to Apple offices “as little as twice a week,” while many design team meetings took place in San Francisco so Ive could avoid commuting to Cupertino from his home in the SF Pacific Heights district.
Meetings sometimes reportedly took place in the homes of his employees, at hotels, or other locations, and Ive did much of his work in a San Francisco-based office and studio. That location is now the home of Ive’s new LoveFrom business.
Although by the end of 2017 Jony Ive had re-assumed some of his previous leadership responsibilities, and Dye and Howarth had been removed from Apple’s leadership page, Ive was still only coming into the office a few days a week.