Maybe a design blow-up is just what Apple needed

With Alan Dye departing for Meta and leaving a hollowed-out design division behind him, his replacement, Stephen Lemay, will have a rare opportunity to rebuild the company’s design culture from the inside out.

A bit of context

Jony Ive had a stellar tenure at Apple, and I love the man. But I think it’s fair to venture that his best ideas and decisions as the company’s design lead weren’t exactly the ones conceived during his latter years in Cupertino.

Still, while Ive is celebrated for the iconic designs of countless Apple products, perhaps one of his most overlooked works at the company was building a tight-knit core design team, and a strong sense of culture.

For years under his leadership, and particularly after he inherited human interface responsibilities following Scott Forstall’s ouster, the group remained remarkably stable, with almost no significant departures for years.

When Ive departed in 2019, it looked like he had left behind a well-oiled machine, with long-time alums in charge of hardware (Evans Hankey) and software (Alan Dye) design.

At first, they seemed to have enough fire and guts to the point of quickly undoing some of their boss’s previous decisions, and Apple’s overall design improved because of that.

But then, things quickly unraveled, starting with Evans Hankey’s departure in 2022. Since Apple had no one ready to take her place, the company simply extinguished her position and handed her responsibilities to then-Chief Operating Officer Jeff Williams.

To make things even more surreal, Apple announced that its “design team will (…) transition to reporting directly to Cook after Williams retires late in the year”, which he just did.

In the years that followed, Apple continued to lose hardware design talent, including Tang Tan, who currently works alongside Hankey (and many other former Apple designers) at Ive’s io product group within OpenAI.

And just recently, Bloomberg reported that Apple’s design team had been losing designers “left and right” to OpenAI, only a few days after reporting that Abidur Chowdhury, who introduced and helped design the iPhone Air, had left for an AI startup.

Yes, but that’s all hardware. What about Dye?

When it comes to software design, Apple hasn’t had many high-profile departures because, frankly, it hasn’t had that many high-profile designers for years. And as John Gruber noted yesterday, that is by design (no pun intended) to a certain extent:

“Dye’s replacement at Apple is longtime Apple designer Stephen Lemay. I’ve never met Lemay (or at least can’t recall meeting him), and prior to today never heard much about him. But that’s typical for Apple employees. Part of the job working for Apple is remaining under the radar and out of the public eye.”

To be clear, Apple does have great software and UI designers, albeit under questionable leadership. And if I’m being honest, I don’t dislike Liquid Glass as much as it seems to be the general sentiment (especially online) toward it.

But I do feel that Apple’s overall UI design has been going relentlessly backwards for longer than it would have been acceptable at any other point in the company’s history.

Just in recent years, under Dye’s tenure, Mac users had to endure the disastrous rollout of the System Settings overhaul, while users of every Apple platform have had to live with the ellipsis cop-out that has become endemic across the company’s interfaces whenever they’re unsure of what to do with basic interface elements.

Add to that the growing inconsistency across platforms, the muddled hierarchy, the ever-present sense of unfinished work, and the list can go on for quite a while.

In the end, Dye’s departure feels less like a surprise (or the mic drop he seems to think it is, without realizing he’s actually holding a banana), and more like the logical continuation of a years-long implosion that has been eating away at Apple’s overall design practice.

But it also definitively marks the end of the post-Ive era at Apple, especially when you consider that Stephen Lemay has been around since 1999.

It would be foolish to expect Lemay to bring about any bold changes to Apple’s design in the next couple of years. In fact, it would be impossible.

Apple’s design culture is all over the place, departures abound, hardware and software have drifted apart, and the truth is that design has simply lost the clout and the fury it once had inside the company. Apple still talks plenty about it, for sure, but this just helps underscore how much of it has gone missing over the years.

Still, Lemay’s appointment does symbolize something that Apple hasn’t really had in a long time: a genuine reset, not all that different from the one that the company was going through when he first joined.

And to be clear, I don’t have any illusions that Lemay could be the next Ive, but that is precisely the point. I hope he is not. It’s time to move on, and as someone said, figure out what’s next.

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