Design as a System: How Apple Keeps Its Edge Without Jony
Ive
Analysis · October 2026
The idea in brief
• Apple's design is not a matter of aesthetics but an organizational capability that integrates hardware, software, and silicon. That is what makes it hard to copy.
• Jony Ive's departure in 2019 exposed the risk of depending on one person: according to several reports, the studio lost influence and nearly all of its Ive-era talent.
• The current answer is an unusual governance bet: CEO John Ternus has, in practice, taken over the direction of design. It turns a personal virtue into a discipline of top management, but it moves the key-person risk rather than removing it.
When Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997,
the company was on the brink of bankruptcy. What saved it was not exclusive
technology but an idea: that a translucent, colorful computer, the 1998 iMac,
could be desirable. Nearly three decades later, Apple became the first company
to surpass $3 trillion in market capitalization, and its new CEO summed up the
bet for employees in a simple line: Apple is the most beautifully designed thing
most of its customers own, and it must stay that way.
The uncomfortable question is whether that advantage is durable. Jony Ive, the designer who shaped the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad, left the company in 2019. Most of his longtime collaborators have since left as well, and for seven years no one filled the central role he held. This article makes three arguments: that Apple's design is a competitive advantage precisely because it is a system and not a style; that the system weakened after Ive's exit; and that Apple is trying to rebuild it with a new governance model that has clear virtues and risks worth naming.
What the advantage really is
It is tempting to explain Apple by the beauty of its products. That is an incomplete reading. The advantage comes from three mechanisms that design makes possible.
The first is integration. Apple designs the device, the operating system and, since the 2020 move to Apple Silicon, the processor. That chain allows decisions a fragmented competitor can hardly make: giving up a millimeter of thickness to gain battery life, or tuning a software animation to the exact characteristics of a display. An Android phone maker depends on Google for the operating system and on third parties for the chip; a Windows PC maker shares control with Microsoft and the processor suppliers. A rival can match a camera. It is much harder to match the feeling that everything works as a single object.
The second is the ecosystem. Earbuds that pair instantly, a watch that unlocks the computer, a message that hops from one device to another: each product is better because the others exist. That coherence raises the cost of switching brands. Here design is not the casing but the architecture of the experience.
The third is pricing power. A product perceived as the most carefully made on the market sustains a premium and margins that in turn fund more precision manufacturing and more development. It is a virtuous circle, but it depends on the perception of quality being renewed with every generation.
What makes this advantage hard to copy is not a technical secret but coordination: engineering, design, operations, and marketing aligned behind a single hierarchy of priorities. That is exactly the asset that dependence on one person puts at risk.
The Ive model and its fragility
Under Jobs and Ive, the design studio worked like a small, protected organism: few members, direct access to the CEO, endless prototypes, and an informal rule that design had a decisive voice over the product. The obsession with materials, the simplicity inherited from Dieter Rams, and the intolerance of careless detail were not ornaments. They were a shared decision criterion.
But that model rested on two personal relationships. In 2015 Ive stepped back from day-to-day management as chief design officer; in 2019 he left to found LoveFrom. Evans Hankey took over industrial design and the studio came under the supervision of Jeff Williams, then chief operating officer. According to Bloomberg reports picked up by several outlets, the studio carried less weight internally, some described it as a "service bureau," and nearly all of the Ive-era designers ended up leaving. Hankey also left, and Alan Dye, who led interface design, moved to Meta.
It is worth being precise: none of this means Apple stopped shipping admired products. Its own silicon, for example, kept improving. But the difference between maintaining a product line and maintaining a design culture is what separates a present advantage from a future one. Over time, according to those reports, operational efficiency, manufacturing scale, and business execution gained ground over design as a strategic voice.
How Apple sustains it today: four mechanisms
1. From genius to governance. Apple has not started a search for an outside design chief. Instead, John Ternus, who took over design oversight in late 2025 and has been CEO since September 1, 2026, has become the de facto head: according to Bloomberg and journalist Mark Gurman, he works in the studio several times a week, sometimes more than once a day. The change is fundamental. Under Cook, design answered to an intermediate executive; today it answers to the person who makes the final call. The upside is speed and an internal signal: the whole organization understands that design matters again. The risk is replacing dependence on Ive with dependence on the CEO, who must also handle component prices, artificial intelligence, and the supply chain.
2. Two studios, one standard. Industrial design is led by Molly Anderson; human interface design by Steve Lemay, who succeeded Dye. Apple has presented them together at recent launches, a deliberate gesture, because the seam between hardware and software is where its advantage lives. Ternus sits at that junction, and executives such as Craig Federighi and Greg Joswiak retain a voice in the company's overall aesthetic.
3. Engineering and design on the same side. Ternus comes from hardware product engineering. A recent analysis notes that under Ive, design and engineering often clashed, and that Ternus wants them to work together. It corrects a flaw of the earlier model: beauty that was sometimes paid for in manufacturing difficulty. And the ability to manufacture at scale what others cannot produce is part of Apple's moat, not a logistical detail.
4. Rebuilding the talent. Apple has listed Anderson as vice president of industrial design on its leadership page and has brought in new profiles, such as Belgian furniture designer Julien Renault. It is fresh blood, not clones of the Ive era. Rebuilding a design culture takes years; Bloomberg underscored this by noting that Ternus had only weeks before taking the job. The indicator to watch is not hiring announcements but the consistency of the products over the next three to five years.
The risks that remain open
First, key-person risk does not disappear: it moves upward. A model that depends on the CEO's attention works as long as the CEO has it, and is fragile when the calendar fills up.
Second, artificial intelligence changes the terrain. The next relevant interface may not be a glass rectangle. One irony of history: LoveFrom, Ive's firm, now works with OpenAI, a company that aims to define the next category of devices. In addition, the delay of the Siri overhaul, which reports say will arrive with iOS 27, is a reminder that in the AI era the quality of the experience is increasingly a matter of software behavior, not just form.
Third, cost pressure. Rising memory and storage prices are pushing device prices up. A price premium holds only if perceived value keeps pace. If design stops justifying it, the advantage becomes a vulnerability.
Lessons for business leaders
Treat design as an organizational capability, not an individual's talent. What Apple lost in 2019 was not just a person but the shared standard that person embodied. Documenting principles, training successors, and rotating leadership are ways to institutionalize it.
Place design where product and pricing decisions are made. Apple's experience suggests that when design answers to an operational-efficiency function, its voice is diluted. When it answers to the CEO, it is heard.
Measure the advantage by coherence, not awards. The health signal of a design system is that each new product reinforces the others and that customers perceive them as parts of a whole.
Plan the succession of the charismatic leader before they leave. Seven years without a single leader had a cost. Companies built around a central figure should have a day-after plan starting today.
Conclusion
The question is not whether Apple can design without Jony Ive. It is whether it can do so without depending on anyone in particular. Its current answer, an engineer CEO who becomes the design chief, is consistent with its history and with its need to integrate hardware, software, and artificial intelligence more tightly. But it is also a transitional solution: it works well as long as the figure is there. The real test will be whether, a decade from now, the system still produces the same results when Ternus is no longer in the studio every day.
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