The story is this: Nearly every designer who worked under Jony Ive has now left the company. The team that built the iPhone, the Apple Watch, the iPad, the AirPods. Gone.
Where they went changes everything.
OpenAI paid $6.5 billion for Jony Ive’s startup. His team is now building what Sam Altman calls “the coolest piece of technology the world will have ever seen.” A screenless AI device. The anti-iPhone. Designed by the people who designed the iPhone.
Meta paid over $200 million to poach Apple’s head of AI foundation models. This week they took Apple’s UI design chief and his deputy. In one month alone, 25 former Apple employees joined OpenAI’s hardware division.
The numbers tell the rest.
Vision Pro sales collapsed 75 percent in a single quarter. Apple has paused its next headset to chase smart glasses. Meta already owns 73 percent of that market with 2 million Ray-Ban units sold.
For the first time since Steve Jobs returned in 1997, Apple has no design chief. The position was eliminated. Design now reports to operations.
Apple’s median employee tenure: 1.7 years. The lowest of any top 20 U.S. tech company.
The architects of the most valuable company on Earth are now building its replacements.
This is not executive turnover. This is the largest redistribution of creative capital in technology history.
The smartphone era was designed in Cupertino.
The next era will be designed by the people who left.
What comes after the iPhone will be built by its creators.
