9, 2026, on the Apple campus in Cupertino, Calif. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu) Apple CEO John Ternus displays the iPhone Duo on Wednesday, Sept.
Apple is rebuilding its design team rather than hiring a new design chief
Nobody at Apple has held that combined role since Jony Ive left in 2019. When Williams retired in 2025, Apple said design would report to Cook. Molly Anderson, who had never managed a team of this size, became vice president of industrial design in 2024. The first products to reach buyers under this setup are close: Apple’s smart home hub is set to be unveiled on October 13, the iPhone Duo goes on sale later this month, and a lighter MacBook Pro with an OLED touch screen is expected to follow next month.
After Ive left, industrial design and human interface got separate leaders who reported to former COO Jeff Williams, a manufacturing specialist with no design background.
In practice, the teams answered to Ternus, who was made the internal “executive sponsor” of design ahead of the CEO handover. Apple CEO John Ternus has quietly taken on a second job. About a month after succeeding Tim Cook, Ternus has made himself the company’s de facto design chief, overseeing both the industrial design team that shapes Apple ‘s hardware and the human interface team behind its software. The detail comes from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, who writes in his Power On newsletter that Ternus works hands-on in the design studio several times a week, sometimes dropping in more than once a day. Apple is not looking for an outside chief design officer either. For a company whose identity is tied so closely to how its products look and feel, that makes the new CEO the final word on design, much as Steve Jobs was. Between April and September, the design leaders were effectively his only direct reports. The studio he inherited had thinned out. Designers left for Ive’s firm LoveFrom and OpenAI’s hardware group, among others. Software design chief Alan Dye moved to Meta, and Ive’s successor Evans Hankey eventually joined OpenAI. Apple had to promote junior designers and hire heavily from outside. Whether an engineer can fill the space Ive left behind remains an open question. What is clear is that design once again has a direct line to the CEO’s office, and the first real tests are close. The weight cut comes from inside, where Apple has reportedly shrunk parts and rearranged components.