Apple has a new Industrial Design Leader, Molly Anderson
Molly Anderson Takes the Helm: Balancing Aesthetic Elegance and Functional Innovation in Apple's Industrial Design
The Apple Industrial Design Group is one of the company’s most important departments. Established in 1977, its goal was to design the physical appearance of Apple products in-house rather than outsourcing the design process to third-party companies. The team has been instrumental in defining Apple’s hardware design language.
Over the years, the design team has undergone significant changes that directly affected the design language of Apple’s products. The most notable change was the appointment of Jony Ive in 1997 as the Senior Vice President of Industrial Design, shortly after Steve Jobs returned to Apple.
Twenty-seven years after Jony Ive’s appointment, he resigned from Apple to focus on his new venture, LoveFrom. Ive personally chose his successor, Evans Hankey, who led the team for three years before leaving the company. Hankey’s departure had a ripple effect—other designers on the team began to leave as well, and Apple had a hard time finding a new lead designer as a result.
Since Apple was unable to find a suitable replacement for Hankey based on seniority, they handed Chief Operating Officer Jeff Williams full control over the team. All the designers on the team reported to him directly until further notice.
That notice has come, as Apple has picked a new leader for the team, Molly Anderson, who now holds the title of Industrial Design Leader, according to a report by Mark Gurman (scroll down to "The Bench" heading). The team is now mainly composed of designers who did not work under Jony Ive.
What to expect from Anderson?
In my research into Anderson, I was not able to find much information about her professional background or design philosophy. However, we do know that Anderson was part of the design process that resulted in the M4 iPad Pro, as per an interview she did with Design Milk.
In the interview, she talks about how the new iPad Pro is “the thinnest iPad that we’ve ever made. It’s also the thinnest Apple product we’ve ever made.” She also states, “On top of that, it’s incredibly light… 25% lighter than the previous generation.”
Anderson also discusses redesigning the internal components of the iPad to contribute to its structural integrity and heat dissipation: “We’ve designed it almost like a spine, radiating out so it’s supporting the enclosure like a structural rib… an incredibly beautiful kind of structural backbone which makes it rigid and also distributes the thermals. It has this lovely duality of doing multiple things while being this incredibly elegant component inside of the product.”
Here’s a picture of the internals of the new iPad, the part sandwiched by the two batteries is main logic board assembly which is also the “spine“ Anderson was referring too. This photo is courtesy of iFixt.
X-ray view of the internal components, from iFixit/Creative Electron
From Anderson’s comments, we can infer that her design philosophy shares some similarities with that of Jony Ive, who also favored light and thin products. However, where the similarities end, in my opinion, is that Anderson places equal emphasis on the functionality of a product, rather than focusing primarily on aesthetics. The redesigned internals of the new iPad are a product of this blend of aesthetic and functional design philosophy.