Jony Ive leaves a legacy of pushing Apple's products toward disposability and unrepairability, a choice that has reverberated across the consumer tech industry
but when he assumed control over the entire Apple experience, their products left the realm of the practical professional & became toys for people like him who get driven around in Bentleys. https://twitter.com/... Greg Otto / @gregotto : This take by @jason_koebler is the only take you should read on Jony Ive https://www.vice.com/... https://twitter.com/... Geoffrey A. Fowler / @geoffreyfowler : A harsher view on Jony Ive's design legacy, from @jason_koebler https://www.vice.com/... He's right that Apple's obsession with thin has made its devices hard to repair, upgrade & recycle. I wrote about the explosive problem with glued-in batteries here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ... Mike Murphy / @mcwm : I believe @Jason_koebler is right here: History will not be kind to Jony Ive and his unrepairable aluminum and glass boxes https://www.vice.com/... Joe Ortiz / @leojtravis10 : Sadly, Jason is spot on here. History won't be kind to Sir Jony. https://twitter.com/... Yusuf Habu / @yusuf_habu : “To design something really new and innovative you have to reject reason” -Jony Ive https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
This critique lands on the day Apple confirmed that Jony Ive would leave after more than two decades to found LoveFrom, with Apple as its first client and no successor taking the chief design officer title (departure announcement). It is the sharpest counterpoint in a wave of mostly celebratory coverage: where other outlets assess Ive's influence on aesthetics, Jason Koebler argues his real legacy is structural — an obsession with thinness that made Apple's devices hard to open, upgrade, or recycle.
The argument has a longer arc behind it. Apple had reportedly begun preparing for Ive's exit back in 2015, as software and services overtook hardware in importance (Stratechery's account of the succession planning) — which reframes unrepairable hardware not as a design quirk but as a business model: sealed devices pair naturally with subscription revenue. Later reporting on Ive's frustrations over his shrinking remit adds texture to why the man himself moved on.
First-order effects
- Apple exits the Ive era with the design function dissolved into the broader organization rather than concentrated under one officer, while the company simultaneously leans harder into services — the model that makes short-lived, non-upgradeable hardware economically rational.
Second-order effects
- Competitors who spent two decades imitating Apple's glued-shut, thinner-is-better industrial design inherit the criticism without the design halo, and face buyers and regulators increasingly primed to ask why phones and laptops cannot be opened.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the industry splits between sealed devices optimized for replacement cycles and a growing repairability movement — with legislation and independent-repair markets emerging as the check on a design philosophy one designer did more than anyone to normalize.
The trend: Consumer electronics is consolidating around sealed, service-attached hardware whose value lies in software subscriptions rather than device longevity, and the reckoning over that trade-off is only beginning.