Apple loses chief of hardware design

Evans Hanke, Apple’s head of hardware design, is leaving the company. Hence, the group’s central design department is on the cusp of a coup once again: Hanke took over the role just over three years ago from former chief design officer Jony Ive, who shaped Apple design with a largely permanent team for nearly 20 years — and with books on several products. Always the design date. The reasons for Hanke’s sudden departure have not been revealed.

Criticism of Eve’s Late Works

Apple said in a statement to financial news agency Bloomberg on Friday that the director intends to oversee the change at the helm of the team. A successor has not been named. It is only said that the design team has strong leaders with long experience. With Eve’s departure, Apple’s design leadership split between hardware and software design in 2019. Hanke reported to Apple’s COO, Jeff Williams, not Apple’s president, Tim Cook, as did Alan Dye, who remained in charge of software design.

Hardware design has become more and more austere in Ive’s later years as chief design officer at Apple: The lineup began to falter, especially with laptops, and kept customers away from missing interfaces and an unreliable keyboard, which was only replaced by an entirely new version after several series of models. Under Hankey’s leadership, the company seemed to be listening to customer requests once again, bringing several deleted interfaces back to the rebooted 2021 MacBook Pro.

Apple Headphone Forward

At the moment, it is still unclear who will take charge of design at Apple and what the consequences will be for future products. Observers expect the company to launch a mixed reality headset next year, which will be the first entirely new major product category since the launch of the Apple Watch in 2015.