After 18 years with Apple, Human Interface chief Greg Christie is leaving the company at the end of the year. Christie was instrumental in the development of the first iPhoneOS. There were recent suggestions that the retirement announcement was promoted by difficulties regarding working with Senior VP of Design, Jony Ive. Apple has denied any problems in their official announcements, and have stated that Christie has been planning his retirement from Apple for some time, and that he will be staying on until the end of the year while some restructuring of Apple’s Human Interface Group takes place.
On his blog, John Gruber weighs in;
“The basic gist I’ve heard is that Christie is a guy who’s been in a high-pressure, high-profile job for 18 years, most of it reporting to Steve Jobs. He’s made a lot of money and is ready to enjoy it. That’s largely in line with the Apple PR line given to the WSJ, but I heard all of this from ground-level Cupertino-area pixel-pushing designers.”
I guess everyone just loves a controversy. Christie reportedly has close to 100 patents with Apple and is listed as one of the inventors of the iPhone’s “slide-to-lock” patent which is an ongoing contention between Apple and Samsung. He has been called upon to testify during the companies’ ongoing court battles. As an interesting side-note, Christie was originally brought on-board at Apple to work on Apple’s first handheld, the Newton MessagePad.
PS: Does anyone else think it’s weird that every site reporting on this only shows a picture of Jonathan Ive? I haven’t been able to find a picture of Greg Christie anywhere.