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.
Kraft Heinz is splitting into two companies a decade after they joined in a massive merger that created one of the biggest food companies on the planet. One of the companies will include brands such as Heinz, Philadelphia cream cheese and Kraft Mac & Cheese. The other will include brands like Oscar Mayer, Kraft Singles and Lunchables. When the company formed in 2015 it wanted to capitalize on its massive scale, but shifting tastes complicated those plans, with households seeking to introduce healthier options at the table. Kraft Heinz's net revenue has fallen every year since 2020.
About 780,000 pressure washers sold at retailers like Home Depot are being recalled across the U.S. and Canada, due to a projectile hazard that has resulted in fractures and other injuries among some consumers.
President Donald Trump has fired one of two Democratic members of the U.S. Surface Transportation Board to break a 2-2 tie ahead of the board considering the largest railroad merger ever proposed.
Ford is recalling more than 355,000 of its pickup trucks across the U.S. because of an instrument panel display failure that’s resulted in critical information, like warning lights and vehicle speed, not showing up on the dashboard.
