Simply two months after introducing the iPhone Air at Apple’s Awe Dropping press occasion, industrial designer and rising star Abidur Chowdhury has left the corporate in what has been described as “the newest setback” for the corporate’s design crew.
Writing for Bloomberg, Mark Gurman experiences that Chowdhury not too long ago moved from Apple Park to a man-made intelligence startup, and that his departure “made waves internally, given his rising profile inside the design crew.” Gurman bases this declare on the testimony of nameless sources with information of the matter.
The iPhone Air announcement was the spotlight of that rising profile. Whereas a number of of Apple’s most senior executives—Tim Prepare dinner, Craig Federighi, Phil Schiller, John Ternus—usually compere its launch displays, smaller sections are fronted by workers who’re extra hands-on with the product. On this case, Chowdhury, who was a key a part of the crew that created the Air, narrated its preliminary advertising and marketing video, together with the essential traces: “A paradox you need to maintain to imagine. That is iPhone Air.”
Chowdhury joined Apple in 2019, the identical 12 months Jony Ive left, and since then, the design crew has at instances felt rudderless. It’s definitely missed Ive’s public profile and gnomic, softly spoken product launch movies, and on this respect a minimum of plainly Chowdhury was being groomed as his successor.
As I mentioned in July 2022, when Apple lastly and formally reduce all ties with Ive, industrial design is an uneasy mix of collaboration and individualism. Merchandise, like camels, are designed by committee, however the public likes to think about there’s a single inventive genius behind every one. That perceptual figurehead was once Jony Ive. However you’d wrestle to search out anybody who talks in such phrases about Evans Hankey, who initially took over Ive’s function in 2019 however left in October 2022, or Molly Anderson, who’s the current incumbent and narrated one other video on the September 2025 occasion. One would hope that is unrelated to the truth that they’re each girls.
Chowdhury is just the newest in a collection of designers and design-related executives to go away Apple lately, together with Ive, Hankey, Marc Newson, and Jeff Williams, who oversaw the design crew following Ive’s exit. Nearly all of Ive’s crew, certainly, left shortly after he did, a few of them to work on his LoveFrom enterprise.
Gurman is at pains to emphasize that Chowdhury’s exit is unrelated to the iPhone Air’s seemingly disappointing gross sales, however doesn’t provide any hints as to the precise purpose he left. Apple has declined to remark.
