Just two months after introducing 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 moved from Apple Park to an artificial intelligence startup, and that his departure “made waves internally, given his rising profile within the design team.” Gurman bases this claim on the testimony of anonymous sources with knowledge of the matter.
The iPhone Air announcement was the highlight of that rising profile. While one or more of Apple’s most senior executives—Tim Cook, Craig Federighi, Phil Schiller, John Ternus—generally compere its launch presentations, smaller sections are fronted by employees who are more hands-on with the product. In this case, Chowdhury, who was a key part of the team that created the Air, narrated its initial marketing video, including the crucial lines: “A paradox you have to hold to believe. This is iPhone Air.”
Chowdhury joined Apple in 2019, the same year Jony Ive left, and since then, the design team has at times felt rudderless. It’s certainly missed Ive’s public profile and gnomic, softly spoken product launch videos, and in this respect at least it seems that Chowdhury was being groomed as his successor.
As I discussed in July 2022, when Apple finally and officially cut all ties with Ive, industrial design is an uneasy blend of collaboration and individualism. Products, like camels, are designed by committee, but the public likes to imagine there’s a single artistic genius behind each one. That perceptual figurehead used to be Jony Ive. But you’d struggle to find anyone who talks in such terms about Evans Hankey, who initially took over Ive’s role in 2019 but left in October 2022, or Molly Anderson, who is the present incumbent and narrated another video at the September 2025 event. One would hope this is unrelated to the fact that they’re both women.
Chowdhury is only the latest in a series of designers and design-related executives to leave Apple in recent years, including Ive, Hankey, Marc Newson, and Jeff Williams, who oversaw the design team following Ive’s exit. Virtually all of Ive’s team, indeed, left shortly after he did, some of them to work on his LoveFrom venture.
Gurman is at pains to emphasise that Chowdhury’s exit is unrelated to the iPhone Air’s seemingly disappointing sales, but doesn’t offer any hints as to the actual reason he left. Apple has declined to comment.