The end of an era: Jony Ive’s indelible mark on Apple and tech

Jony Ive — aka Sir Jonathan Ive, who for the last two-plus decades has been the creative mind behind nearly all of Apple’s iconic hardware — is officially parting ways with the technology company to form his own design firm, LoveFrom. And even though Ive’s firm will continue to work with Apple from the outside, this is still the end of an era for Apple, with the help of Ive’s guidance, return from the brink and become one of the largest and most important companies on the planet.

Ive first started at Apple in 1992, as a member of the design division, where he primarily helped create the Apple Newton. Five years later, and Ive was ready to leave, but the then-returning Steve Jobs appointed him as Apple’s senior vice president of industrial design, starting a creative partnership that would put Apple back on the map.

As Ive tells it (in a story published in The New Yorker), the two began work on what would become the iMac the day that they met, kicking off a slew of products that would not only turn Apple into a corporate force to be reckoned with, but set the gold standard for design across the technology industry at large.

The…