Apple design team leaders Evans Hankey and Alan Dye will now report to COO Jeff Williams; 24-year Apple vet Sabih Khan named SVP of Operations
Apple's longtime head of design, Jony Ive, is leaving the company to start his own design firm, Apple announced today.
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the second act of a slow unwinding of Jony Ive's design empire: the 2015 Cook memo had already split his group into separate industrial (Richard Howarth) and UI (Alan Dye) leadership while keeping Ive nominally on top. Today's announcement removes the top layer entirely — Ive exits to start his own firm, and his two lieutenants, Evans Hankey and Alan Dye, fold into COO Jeff Williams' organization rather than reporting to the CEO, as Ive did.
The same announcement elevates 24-year veteran Sabih Khan to SVP of Operations, keeping the operations succession inside the house. In hindsight, the reporting line was the tell: after Hankey's 2022 departure, Apple declined to replace her and left the design group under Williams, and by 2025 the team was moved to report to Tim Cook directly once Williams retired.
First-order effects
- Evans Hankey and Alan Dye now answer to COO Jeff Williams instead of a dedicated design chief — Apple's most identity-defining function is subsumed into the operations org the day Ive leaves.
- Sabih Khan takes over the SVP of Operations role outright, formalizing a succession that had been running on Williams' dual portfolio of operations and design oversight.
Second-order effects
- With design under the COO, product decisions get weighed against operational and cost considerations at the top of the org chart — the structure that later let Apple simply not backfill Hankey's VP of industrial design role in 2023.
- Ive's independent firm becomes an outside vendor to Apple rather than an inside voice, opening the door to the kind of external design relationships Apple previously handled in-house.
Third-order effects
- The pattern across 2015, 2019, 2022, and 2023 is a steady demotion of design's organizational standing — from CEO-reporting chief to COO subdivision to an unreplaced VP role — suggesting Apple treats design leadership as a distributed capability rather than a throne.
- If the structure holds, the durable lesson for the industry is that founder-era creative leaders are nearly impossible to successor in place: companies either fragment the role (Apple's 2015 move) or let the reporting line quietly absorb it.
The trend: Apple is dismantling the singular design-chief model built around Jony Ive, folding design into operations and executive reporting lines over successive reorganizations.