Jony Ive talks about his new role as Apple's chief design officer as he relinquishes day-to-day management duties to Richard Howarth and Alan Dye
When Stephen Fry met Jony Ive: the self-confessed tech geek talks to Apple's newly promoted chief design officer
Context & Ripple Effects
This interview lands the same week as Tim Cook's memo confirming the reshuffle: from July 1, Jony Ive holds a new chief design officer title while day-to-day management passes to Richard Howarth on hardware and Alan Dye on UI. The Daring Fireball piece in the coverage reads the title not as a step back but as formalizing Ive as Apple's overseer and arbiter of taste — a role compared to Steve Jobs' own.
First-order effects
- Richard Howarth and Alan Dye move into VP roles running industrial design and UI design respectively, taking over managerial work Ive held since joining in 1996.
- Ive retains responsibility for overall design, so decision authority over Apple's look splits between his taste-setting role and the two new VPs' execution roles.
Second-order effects
- The delegation proves reversible: within about two years Ive returns to direct management of the design group, undoing the handoff structure announced here.
- The personnel choices made now cast a long shadow — a decade later, coverage of Apple replacing Alan Dye with career designer Stephen Lemay frames Dye's original promotion as Ive's mistake, given Dye's brand-and-advertising rather than design background.
Third-order effects
- When Ive ultimately leaves in 2019 with no successor taking the chief design officer title (as the FT's retrospective notes), the role created in 2015 turns out to be a person, not a permanent institution — Apple's design leadership reverts to ordinary VP structures rather than a single arbiter of taste.
The trend: Apple's design leadership has spent the decade since this announcement oscillating between concentrating taste-setting authority in one figurehead and distributing it across VPs, a cycle that ended with the CDO title retiring alongside Ive himself.