Apple Design now reports to Tim Cook. Will it make a difference?

There’s a power shift underfoot at Apple. And for the first time since 2023, the Apple design team will report directly to the company’s CEO.

The news comes as Apple announced COO Jeff Williams will be retiring by the end of the year. While Williams will be handing the role over to Sabih Khan, oversight of the design team will not come along with the title. Instead, it will be handled by Tim Cook.

Since 2023, the Apple design team has reported Williams in what seemed like a prioritization of global logistics over design excellence. Williams was an engineer by trade who oversaw the logistics of building Apple products—a most important expertise in running a company the size of Apple. It’s the same expertise that led Tim Cook to rise to the role of CEO of the company.

This move went alongside a deprioritization of design at Apple. Consider that Apple defined itself through a cozy relationship between design and the c-suite, and nowhere was the value of that relationship more historically articulated than in the partnership between Steve Jobs and Jony Ive—which drove Apple’s unprecedented run of inventions, from the iMac to the iPod to the iPhone.

After Jobs’s passing, Ive continued his role as VP of industrial design, where he reported directly to Tim Cook. Rumors point to this relationship being fraught. Ive left Apple in 2019 to form LoveFrom, and Evans Hanky took over the position. But when Hanky left in 2022 (she now works at io, the firm building out OpenAI’s hardware initiatives), design was demoted in the process. Williams stepped in, creating a layer between the CEO and the design team. This timing coincided with a disastrous launch (and subsequent suspension) of Apple’s Vision Pro headset, along with Apple’s lagging strategy reconciling the role of AI in its products.

Truth be told, Apple was not alone in demoting its design team within its greater corporate structure. Roughly 39% of Fortune 500 companies that were part of a recent survey had cut one or two of the top levels of design at their organization, deprioritizing design’s voice within business. Of course, it stung more when Apple would make such a decision, given that it defined the power of design in corporate strategy. 

From what we can tell, this all means that Apple’s design lead Alan Dye, its VP of Human Interface Design, now reports directly to Cook alongside the design team. Apple did not respond to a request for clarification on that point. But in any case, Apple has subtly shifted its organization in what, on paper, seems to put a greater emphasis on design. Time will tell if this move improves Apple’s challenged product strategy.