WSJ: Three of Jony Ive’s industrial designers are leaving Apple

From Tripp Mickle’s Turnover Hits Apple’s Famed Industrial Design Team ($) in Friday’s Wall Street Journal:

Apple’s close-knit industrial design team is undergoing its most pronounced turnover in decades, marking a changing of the guard for the famed group that has defined the tech giant’s aesthetic and spearheaded the development of products including the iPhone.

Rico Zorkendorfer and Daniele De Iuliis, who together have more than 35 years of experience at Apple, decided to leave the company recently, people familiar with the departures said. Another member of the team with a decade of experience, Julian Hönig, plans to leave in the coming months, people familiar with his plans said…

The departures of members of the core design team that revived Apple in the 2000s and did the work behind the iPhone, iPad and watch come amid a pause in new products, as the company emphasizes new subscription services this year instead of new gadgets amid slowing iPhone sales. It also follows chief designer Jony Ive’s resumption a little over a year ago of day-to-day oversight for the industrial design group.

My take: Hard to tell from the outside what this means. Correlation to Ive’s return does not necessarily mean causation, although that’s Mickle’s implication.

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