By Rowland Manthorpe, technology correspondent
Jony Ive is leaving Apple after more than 20 years of designing some the company's most innovative products including the iPhone, iPod and Mac.
Here, Sky News looks back on his career as the company's chief design officer and how he changed the face of tech as we know it today, from the iPod's signature click wheel to the glass iPhone screen.
iMac
The Briton joined Apple in 1992 and at first he was so unhappy he repeatedly considered quitting.
Then, in 1997, Steve Jobs returned to the firm he'd founded and promoted Ive to senior vice president of industrial design.
The iMac was the first product they created together – working, Ive later said, so that "what our eyes physically saw and what we came to perceive were exactly the same".
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And, although it may not seem like it now, at the time its look and feel (those transparent candy-coloured shells) were revolutionary. Apple was back.
iPod
Ive only played a small part in the design of the device that put "1,000 songs in your pocket" and started the reinvention of the music industry.
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The technology for the iPod was bought in from other firms, so Ive had to work with what he was given, a design role he hated.
Nonetheless, his input was crucial. He added the signature click wheel, making the iPod easy for anyone to use, and made the product white, starting a second major tech design trend, and launching an armada of copycat products.
iPhone
The device that changed the world was going to have a plastic screen, until Ive came up with an alternative. The result was the silky-smooth pane of glass which now covers every smartphone in the world. To us, today, it might seem inevitable.
At the time, the idea of putting a big piece of glass in a consumer product, one which would be carried around in people's products, was revolutionary. Of course, there was a downside, as anyone who's cracked a phone screen will know.
But that's classic Ive too: he designs for perfection, even if that means the result is sometimes less than totally practical.
iPad
"It's hard to see how something so simple, so thin and so light could possibly be so capable," Ive said in his video introduction to this product in 2010, words which summed up his design philosophy.
At the very peak of his powers, he was radically simplifying (and squeezing) everything Apple did, removing buttons and (later) eliminating headphone jacks.
Two years later, put in charge of design across Apple's teams, he extended this approach to software, updating the iPad and iPhone to remove old-fashioned "paper" and "leather" icons.
As he said in that video: "Millions upon millions of people are going… to know how to use this." And he was absolutely right.
Apple Watch
The first product Ive put to market after Jobs' death was met with a mixed response. Users complained about its cluttered interface and lack of an obvious purpose.
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