Apple’s long-time chief design officer Jony Ive, the aesthetic mind behind the company’s signature products like the iMac, the iPod, and the iPhone, is leaving the Cupertino-based tech giant to start his own independent design firm. His departure marks another sign of Apple’s transformation from its roots as a hardware company to a digital services giant.
Ive will be starting a company called LoveFrom with Apple peer and industrial designer Marc Newson. Ive had been at Apple for nearly 30 years, while Newson joined in 2014.
“This is not a hard break-up. Apple is going to be Johnny Ive’s first client,” Jason Rotman, a director at Everplus Capital, told Cheddar Friday.
Investors may not be as sure, with shares falling nearly 2 percent after the announcement. But Rotman says, “Number one, the product design pipeline ー in a sense ー has already been set for multiple years, so it’s not like you’re going to start to see massive differences in the look and feel in April products January 2020. So that’s something that should assuage Apple investors.”
Now, investors are left weighing the company’s trillion-dollar market capitalization, which could keep the company’s continuing rise humble, against the strength of Apple’s emerging software and services business and another round of stock buybacks.
“It’s not really the growth story that it used to be, and it’s really a bona fide utility and services company,” Rotman added. “I think we could be seeing peak Apple ー not just because of Jony Ive leaving ー but the overall business has shifted.”
However, he highlighted that much of Apple’s future, including its credit card and the Apple News product, don’t necessarily involve Ive’s aesthetic and product-design expertise.
“What does Jony Ive have to do with the Apple card? Really, not that much,” said Rotman.
Joe Cecela, Dream Exchange CEO, explains how they are aiming to form the first minority-controlled company to operate an exchange in U.S. history. Watch!
A Michigan judge is putting sponges in the hands of shoplifters and ordering them to wash cars in a Walmart parking lot when spring weather arrives. Genesee County Judge Jeffrey Clothier hopes the unusual form of community service discourages people from stealing from Walmart. The judge also wants to reward shoppers with free car washes. Clothier says he began ordering “Walmart wash” sentences this week for shoplifting at the store in Grand Blanc Township. He believes 75 to 100 people eventually will be ordered to wash cars this spring. Clothier says he will be washing cars alongside them when the time comes.
The State Department had been in talks with Elon Musk’s Tesla company to buy armored electric vehicles, but the plans have been put on hold by the Trump administration after reports emerged about a potential $400 million purchase. A State Department spokesperson said the electric car company owned by Musk was the only one that expressed interest back in May 2024. The deal with Tesla was only in its planning phases but it was forecast to be the largest contract of the year. It shows how some of his wealth has come and was still expected to come from taxpayers.
At 100 years old, the Goodyear Blimp is an ageless star in the sky. The 246-foot-long airship will be in the background of the Daytona 500 — flying roughly 1,500 feet above Daytona International Speedway, actually — to celebrate its greatest anniversary tour. Even though remote camera technologies are improving regularly and changing the landscape of aerial footage, the blimp continues to carve out a niche. At Daytona, with the usual 40-car field racing around a 2½-mile superspeedway, views from the blimp aptly provide the scope of the event.
