Star designer leaves Apple two months after introducing iPhone Air
Just two months after showing off the iPhone Air at Apple’s Awe Dropping press event, industrial designer and rising star Abidur Chowdhury has left the company in what has been described as “the latest setback” for the company’s design team.
Writing for Bloomberg, Mark Gurman reports that Chowdhury recently left Apple Park to join an artificial intelligence startup and that his departure “made waves internally, given his growing profile within the design team.” Gurman bases this claim on the testimony of anonymous sources with knowledge of the subject.
The announcement of the iPhone Air was the culmination of this growing popularity. While one or more of Apple’s top executives (Tim Cook, Craig Federighi, Phil Schiller, John Ternus) typically participate in launch presentations, smaller sections are led by employees more familiar with the product. In this case, Chowdhury, who was a key part of the team that created the Air, narrated his initial marketing video, including the crucial lines: “A paradox that has to be held to be believed. It’s the iPhone Air.”
Chowdhury joined Apple in 2019, the same year Jony Ive left, and since then the design team has sometimes felt rudderless. Ive’s public profile and gnomic, bland product launch videos have certainly been missed, and in that respect at least it appears that Chowdhury was being groomed to become his successor.
As I discussed in July 2022, when Apple finally and officially severed all ties with Ive, industrial design is a difficult mix of collaboration and individualism. Products, like camels, are designed by committee, but the public likes to imagine that there is a single artistic genius behind each one. This perceptual figurehead was Jony Ive. But you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone speaking in such terms about Evans Hankey, who initially took over the role of Ive in 2019 but left in October 2022, or Molly Anderson, who is the current incumbent and narrated another video at the September 2025 event. One would hope that this has nothing to do with the fact that they are both women.
Chowdhury is just the latest in a string of designers and design industry executives to leave Apple in recent years, including Ive, Hankey, Marc Newson and Jeff Williams, who oversaw the design team after Ive left. Indeed, almost all of Ive’s team left shortly after him, some of them to work on his LoveFrom project.
Gurman is at pains to point out that Chowdhury’s departure has nothing to do with the apparently disappointing sales of the iPhone Air, but gives no indication of the real reason for his departure. Apple declined to comment.
