Apple VP Industrial Design Evans Hankey to leave in 6 months

Hankey was part of the team that designed the iconic MacBook Air

Her dad was a geologist and a picture of her iPhone appeared in 2016’s Designed By Apple in California photo book, now Jony Ive protégé, Evans Hankey, will quit the company in six months’ time, reports claim.

Evans Hankey got her photo in the book

Apple’s current vice president of industrial design, Hankey has been involved in hardware design at the company for years.

She once explained that the design of the first MacBook Air began when the design team, “put display housings together from what I guess would have been the PowerBook at the time.”

Hankey took her position as chief of hardware three years ago when Jony Ive quit the company.

She holds over 300 patents and studied industrial product and design at Stanford University. Reports claim she intends to stick with her team for six months before she leaves, and Apple hasn’t named a replacement yet.

What Apple said

In a statement, Apple said:

“Apple’s design team brings together expert creatives from around the world and across many disciplines to imagine products that are undeniably Apple.”

“The senior design team has strong leaders with decades of experience. Evans plans to stay on as we work through the transition, and we’d like to thank her for her leadership and contributions.”

Her departure follows just a few months since Sir Jony Ive officially quit working with the company that helped him climb to prominence. It comes at a time when Apple watchers regularly note that the influence of designers on Apple’s decision-making has waned as the company becomes the huge corporation it is today.

What we know about Hankey’s thought process

Other than Apple’s hardware and services, what we know about Hankey is captured in the words she’s shared.

“So much of what we value for the team and for the company, really started in the early days of design at Apple,” Hankey told Wallpaper in 2021.

“We cannot overstate how lucky we are to be at a company with such a rich and deep foundation. From the very early “think different” mantra to Steve and Jony’s collective focus on craft, care and making tools, to their reverence for the creative process, this is what still drives us.”

On the bright side, as is always the case when someone important leaves post, I guess this means there will be some happy/sad gifts shared across Apple’s design team this Christmas. “We have this tradition of making things for one another at Christmas,” Hankey once said.

“It’s about that joy of making and joy of giving. It’s something that’s come from the culture of the team.”

It will, of course, be interesting to see if Apple Glass and the new Apple reality mark Hankey’s triumphant swan song.

I think it might…

Not to neglect her former boss, Ive once said, “I always think that there are two products at the end of a programme; there is the physical product or the service, the thing that you have managed to make, and then there is all that you have learned. The power of what you have learned enables you to do the next thing and it enables you to do the next thing better.”

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