IT News on October 5th: Since Jonathan Ive ( Jony Ive ) left Apple in 2019, the company has not had a true chief design officer. For some time thereafter, former Chief Operating Officer Jeff Williams ( Jeff Williams ) took over the design team until he resigned last year. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman ( Mark Gurman ) stated that since Jeff Williams' departure, CEO John Ternus ( John Ternus ) has invested a great deal of effort into Apple's two design teams: the Industrial Design team and the Human-Computer Interaction Design team.

IT noticed that this matter actually began about a month before Ternus officially took on the role of CEO, triggered by Jeff Williams' resignation from his position as Chief Operating Officer. At that time, Apple announced that the two design teams mentioned above would report to then-CEO Tim Cook ( Tim Cook ). However, in reality, it was John Ternus who took over. This also became one of his core responsibilities during his transition to the CEO position.

Of course, it is not surprising that Tenuis is willing to be deeply involved in design matters, as he was previously in charge of hardware engineering. However, Gorman stated that Tenuis is already "deeply committed" to design-related work and often goes to the studio to work together with the team.

After officially taking on the role of CEO, he devoted himself wholeheartedly to the work of the industrial design and human-computer interaction teams. Several people familiar with the department revealed that he would visit the design studios several times a week to participate in the work personally, and on some days, he would make multiple visits within a single day.

Bloomberg reported that this stands in sharp contrast to former CEO Tim Cook, who used to visit the design studio only about once a month in the past.

At the same time, Tenuis put a lot of effort into filling the vacant positions in the design team. Many design talents had been poached by external companies, resulting in a significant loss of staff. The most notable case was Allen Day ( Alan Dye ) who switched jobs to join Meta; in addition, OpenAI also poached several employees from Apple. To revitalize the team, Apple promoted several designers with less experience and simultaneously recruited new talent from outside.

Even after making these personnel adjustments, Apple has still not found a replacement for Jonathan Ive, who holds the position of Chief Design Officer. Bloomberg reports that the company has not yet initiated any recruitment efforts for this role. In its place, Molly Anderson ( Molly Anderson ) and Steve Remy ( Steve Lemay ) have been appointed to oversee industrial design and human-computer interaction, respectively; however, all final design decisions remain in the hands of Tenuis himself.

Although Tenuis does not have a formal design education background, his high level of dedication to design work indicates one thing: design will still remain a core cornerstone at the senior management level of Apple.