Jony Ive — aka Sir Jonathan Ive, who for the last two-plus decades has been the creative mind behind nearly all of Apple’s iconic hardware — is officially parting ways with the technology company to form his own design firm, LoveFrom. And even though Ive’s firm will continue to work with Apple from the outside, this is still the end of an era for Apple, with the help of Ive’s guidance, return from the brink and become one of the largest and most important companies on the planet.

Ive first started at Apple in 1992, as a member of the design division, where he primarily helped create the Apple Newton. Five years later, and Ive was ready to leave, but the then-returning Steve Jobs appointed him as Apple’s senior vice president of industrial design, starting a creative partnership that would put Apple back on the map.

As Ive tells it (in a story published in The New Yorker), the two began work on what would become the iMac the day that they met, kicking off a slew of products that would not only turn Apple into a corporate force to be reckoned with, but set the gold standard for design across the technology industry at large.

The iMac’s success would soon be followed by another even greater one: the iPod, another Jobs / Ive collaboration that would cement Ive’s place as Apple’s de-facto right hand man. If Jobs was the visionary whose ideas would change the world of computing, Ive was the one who would dress them up and make them irresistible to consumers. At the height of the iPod’s popularity, Ive’s designs were so ubiquitous that even the white headphones that came with the device were instantly recognizable.

And of course, there’s the many generations of the iPhone, Apple’s most important product and one that literally would change what we even thought about a phone to be. All of that design — the touchscreen, the home button, the form factor — came from Ive. And that influence would reverberate through the industry, to the point where many phones today still follow Apple’s lead in terms of design.

In 2012, Ive was placed in charge of all of Apple’s Human Interface projects to replace Scott Forstall, giving the designer the keys to the look and feel of all of Apple’s hardware and software. That role would culminate in the release of iOS 7 the following year, the biggest visual redesign to the iPhone and iPad’s software in the decade-plus they’ve been around, and one that still exists today as the guiding aesthetic across all of Apple’s software.

Ive’s influence would ebb and flow over the years

Ive’s influence would ebb and flow over the years: in 2015, he was appointed as Apple’s ‘chief design officer’ in a more hands-off role that would see him hand off day-to-day management duties for Apple’s hardware and software teams to new managers. Instead, Ive would “remain responsible for all of our design, focusing entirely on current design projects, new ideas and future initiatives.” Many at the time viewed the move as a precursor to Ive leaving the company entirely.

But in 2017, Ive took control of the design divisions again, but if this was a comeback, it was short lived, seeing as Ive is set to leave again for good at pending departure at the end of this year. All this goes to show that it’s hard to tell exactly what Ive’s exact role has been at Apple the past few years — outside of making his famous “white room” videos — or how long his transition away from the company has been in the works.

Ive’s designs would change over time: the bright plastics of the start of the iMac and iBook would shift towards uniform white designs and eventually Ive’s beloved “aluminium” that still dominates Apple’s lineup to this day. It’s a career of spectacular highs, like the aforementioned iPhone, iPod, and iMac, as well as some bewildering lows, like the iPod Hi-Fi or the just plain awful Magic Mouse 2 and the 1st-gen Apple Pencil. There was also an obsession with thinness that didn’t always help, which had consequences for battery life on the iPhone and the busted keyboards on recent MacBook Pros.

While it’s easy to make jokes about some of those designs and others were genuine misses, it’s important to recognize just how widespread Ive’s influence on the entire tech industry has become. Every smartphone has been inspired by the original iPhone full-screen design and every laptop gets compared to the iconic the MacBook Air design.

It’s a career of spectacular highs and some bewildering lows

Despite Ive formally leaving Apple, his influence on the company isn’t going anyway. Ive’s new firm LoveFrom counts Apple as its first client, and will “continue to work closely and on a range of projects with Apple.” And no doubt Ive’s aesthetic and design ethos will continue to echo on through Apple’s halls — it’s be hard for it not to, frankly, given that Ive also quite literally designed the company’s new headquarters.

Still, Ive leaving does mark the end of an era, one that’s seeing Apple start to move away from it’s reliance on Ive-designed hardware products for more lucrative services. The world of hardware may never be the same again.