Apple and Jony Ive are no longer working together

Apple has ended its consulting agreement with former chief design officer Jony Ive, according to The New York Times.

Ive left Apple in 2019 to start an independent design company called LoveFrom, and in a press release, Ive had said he looked forward to working with Apple “for many years to come.” Apple signed a contract at the time with Ive valued north of $100 million, though it “restricted Mr. Ive from taking on work that Apple found competitive,” The New York Times reports.

But now, three years later, it seems Ive and Apple have decided to call it quits. From The New York Times:

In recent weeks, with the contract coming up for renewal, the parties agreed not to extend it. Some Apple executives had questioned how much the company was paying Mr. Ive and had grown frustrated after several of its designers left to join Mr. Ive’s firm. And Mr. Ive wanted the freedom to take on clients without needing Apple’s clearance, these people said.

Moving forward, Apple COO Jeff Williams will continue to manage Apple’s design teams, though the product marketing team has “assumed a central role in product choices,” The New York Times says. LoveFrom will keep working with Airbnb and Ferrari. Apple and LoveFrom didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment.

Ive, who joined Apple in 1992, was the visionary behind many of Apple’s most iconic hardware designs, including the iMac and the iPod’s white headphones. After Scott Forstall’s ouster, Ive was put in charge of software design, too, resulting in the radically different look for iOS 7.

While his 2019 departure may have marked the end of an era, now, after 30 years working with the company, the age of Ive at Apple is truly over.