Breaking: iPhone Air designer quits and joins a mysterious AI startup.

iPhone Air

Ill - fated

The iPhone Air might be Apple's most ill - fated product in recent years. After the news that the iPhone Air 2 was postponed due to poor sales, another piece of bad news followed.

According to Bloomberg, Apple designer Abidur Chowdhury, who served as the main speaker and represented the designers in the iPhone Air promotional video, has left Apple and joined an unnamed AI startup.

This means that Apple's design team has lost another key member.

Abidur Chowdhury

Bloomberg's Mark Gurman said that Abidur Chowdhury's departure has nothing to do with the poor sales of the iPhone Air. In fact, the design of the iPhone Air was well - received within Apple, and Abidur Chowdhury played a key role in it.

Born in London and now living in San Francisco, Abidur Chowdhury is a young designer who is easily memorable. Growing up in a multicultural city, like Jony Ive, he was rigorously trained in the British industrial design system. However, he has always been thinking about the next - generation product design. He used the following sentence on his personal website to explain his design concept:

Nothing excites me more than creating innovative products that people can't live without.

He once interned at Cambridge Consultants and Curventa in the UK. Later, Chowdhury worked as an industrial designer at Layer Design in London. From 2018 to 2019, he ran his own consulting firm, Abidur Chowdhury Design, collaborating with design agencies, innovation companies, and startups to provide product, experience, and design strategies.

In January 2019 - just before Jony Ive left Apple, Abidur Chowdhury joined Apple as an industrial designer in Cupertino, California.

In just six years, Chowdhury participated in the design of a series of Apple's most innovative products, including the iPhone Air. At the Apple press conference, Chowdhury introduced the design concept of this iPhone as follows:

Our original intention was to create an iPhone for the future.

Now, Abidur Chowdhury has gone to pursue his future.

Since 2019, Apple's design team has been quite unstable. Many veteran designers have either retired or left Apple to join other companies, including LoveFrom, a design firm founded by former Apple Chief Design Officer Jony Ive, and io, an AI hardware company.

After Ive left, Evans Hankey briefly took over Apple's design team until he left in 2022. Later, Evans Hankey, Jony Ive, and several former Apple employees founded the AI hardware company io, which was acquired by OpenAI for a sky - high price of $6.5 billion in July this year. So far, io has not released any hardware products.

The current head of Apple's design, Molly Anderson, is one of the few designers who have remained at Apple since the Jony Ive era. She emphasizes a product design philosophy based on essential intuition.

She once said in an interview that during the design process, one should not be restricted by existing products but focus on designing tools that best meet users' needs and pay attention to the integration of software and hardware. The design of the latest ultra - thin iPad Pro and iPhone 17 Pro was led by Molly Anderson.

Just last week, Jeff Williams, Apple's second - in - command and Chief Operating Officer, retired. Previously, the Apple design team was under Williams' management, and in the future, it will report directly to Apple CEO Tim Cook.

For Apple, the decline in the company's attractiveness, serious brain drain, and the lack of a well - rounded young team are major challenges the company is currently facing. Next year is a crucial milestone as it marks Apple's 50th anniversary.

According to the Financial Times, Apple CEO Cook is accelerating his succession plan, and John Ternus, the current senior vice - president of Apple's hardware and a strong candidate for the next Apple CEO, will take on a leading role.

What this person in charge of the iPhone has to face is how to stabilize the situation, unite the team, and lead Apple through the second half of its journey towards becoming a century - old company.

This article is from the WeChat official account "ifanr" (ID: ifanr), author: Xiao Qinpeng, published by 36Kr with authorization.