John Ternus set to re-establish importance of Apple's design team when he takes over as CEO: report

Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman today posted the latest edition of his Power On newsletter, recapping the last ten years of Apple’s corporate structure in which the influence of the design team waned at the executive levels in the Cook era, fuelled by Jony Ive’s exit and talent departures as finance and operations had an increasingly larger say over product direction.

However, Gurman believes that incoming CEO John Ternus may be about to reset that relationship, and reaffirm the importance of the design group for the company’s future.

After Ive left the company, oversight of the design team fell to ex-COO Jeff Williams. This was already a major shakeup from the prior regime where Ive’s industrial design group dictated the product roadmap of the company from the top-down.

This arrangement was highlighted all the way back in 2011, in Steve Jobs’ biography by Walter Isaacson. Jobs is quoted as saying that Ive has more operational power than anyone at Apple apart from himself, because ‘the way I set it up’.

Fast forward to present day and that cannot be farther from the current situation, in which many believe the company has demoted design to be less important than its operations division. Apple doesn’t even have a senior design role right now, and only recently added Molly Anderson and Steve Lemay’s profiles to the leadership page.

Incoming CEO John Ternus, who is presumably going to be more involved in product in general than Cook was, is apparently looking to restore some of the design’s team’s authority. Gurman says that Ternus has already spent a considerable amount of his time with the industrial design group, as he prepares for his succession to begin on September 1.

Ternus is quoted by Gurman as having said that the ‘the most beautifully designed thing that most customers own is an Apple product. We’re going to make sure that stays the case’.

You can read the full profile over at Bloomberg. Externally, Apple PR is presenting Ternus as the face of recent design successes like the MacBook Neo, and Ternus’s first big public-facing role when he takes over will be to introduce the brand new foldable iPhone at a media event in the fall.