He's produced the most influential and iconic device designs of the century so far, and now he has left the company that fostered his work. Here's a look back at some of his most admired work, and we ask the question, what next for Apple without Ive?

The departure of Sir Jony Ive, Apple’s first (and only) Chief Design Officer, is said to have dropped Apple stock by 9 billion dollars.

But in truth, a 1.3% adjustment to the stock cap indicated a well handled exit for a man so closely associated with some of the most successful products in consumer electronics history.

At the height of their powers, the partnership between Steve Jobs and Jony Ive so defined Apple that their departure of either would seem to ensure Apple’s doom.

Didn’t Jobs’ previous 1985 departure lead to Apple’s ultimate near bankruptcy?

Wasn’t Apple all about design and Ive its internationally famous genius designer?

Apple Core Values

Although Jobs gave Ive a pass on stage presentations, Ive’s mellifluous voice-overs for Apple product introduction videos soon made him synonymous with Apple design.

Its hard to overstate the influence of Ive’s time at Apple - Jobs specifically re-structured the org chart so Ive answered to no-one other than him - but design has been fundamental to Apple since its inception.

Some of those welcoming Ive’s exit place the blame on him for Apple’s propensity for devices being hard to repair or upgrade, lacking easily replaceable batteries and so on.

It’s a critique that misses the point that Steve Jobs had a life-long obsession with making computers information appliances, mass market ‘bicycles of the mind’ that serve everyone, not just the tech elite who regard tinkering and upgrading as their prerogative. Never mind, if it adds cost and weight for the vast majority of people who’d never consider it.

At the time of the Mac’s inception, the engineering team had to hide its expandability from Jobs who would otherwise have ruled it out. For the most part, Apple’s decisions have been mocked, then copied by competitors as the insights proved true.

It’s also no accident that when Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997 and launched a global hunt for a new design chief, the winning candidate turned out to be already working at Apple.

From the outset, Apple was a partnership between Steve Wozniak’s technical wizardry and Steve Job’s visionary marketing abilities.

To paraphrase Jobs, Microsoft had the technical resources and all the money in the world to make an iPhone but it lacked the taste to do so. Bill Gates best illustrated this by mockingly dismissing the iMac as Apple leading in colours.