Apple is deepening its financial services play as a means of invigorating revenue, and its expertise could make it a legitimate threat to legacy players. Google's platform-agnostic approach, wide international penetration, and top talent position it as a hub with unrivaled global reach beyond just consumer payments. And Amazon — which has eaten up market share in every industry it's touched, and now has its sights on financial services — could swiftly undercut legacy players.

In The Tech Companies In Financial Services report, Business Insider Intelligence will examine the moves that Apple, Google, and Amazon are making to gain a larger foothold in the global financial services industry. We will then detail each tech company's threat to incumbents and outline potential next steps based on their existing moves in the financial services sphere.

The companies mentioned in the report include: Apple, Amazon, Google, Goldman Sachs, Mastercard, Barclaycard, Citi, Chase, Capital One, Paytm, and PhonePe.

Here are some key takeaways from the report:

In full, the report:

Apple's reported desire to shift production outside of China has been linked to the trade war, but the iPhone maker has plenty of additional reasons to explore a move to other countries, as do many other companies.

Manufacturing in China has long had a number of drawbacks, said Bruce Arntzen, the executive director of the supply chain management program in MIT's engineering school. For years, the benefits of producing products there — most notably a large supply of low-cost labor — outweighed those shortcomings. But those advantages have now largely gone away, he said.

"Most of the reasons everyone went to China in the first place aren't there any more," Arntzen told Business Insider.

Companies in industries including apparel, footwear, aerospace, and automobile parts have already been shifting production out of China in recent years, even before President Trump started slapping tariffs on goods made in the country, he said. It's no surprise that Apple and other electronics makers would be interested in moving production too, he said.

Indeed, some have already started. Some of the Taiwanese electronics manufacturing companies have shifted a portion of their production of server computers out of China to Taiwan over the last year.

Read this: Here's why Apple's plan to escape Trump's tariffs by building iPhones outside of China won't actually be possible anytime soon

From day one, there have been significant downsides to manufacturing goods in China, Arntzen said. For US companies, there were language and time zone differences, he said. The huge geographic distance between the two countries often meant long supply lines between companies' manufacturing facilities and their component makers. That in turn also often meant that they needed long lead times to start manufacturing products to make sure the goods could get to market by particular dates, he said. And those long delays meant that manufacturers couldn't respond quickly to market changes and often had to have larger inventory stashes than they would otherwise, he said.

Companies also faced rampant intellectual property theft, Arntzen said. And if they needed to speed goods to market, they'd have to ship products by air — a much costlier proposition from Shenzhen than Chicago.

"Those challenges were always there," Arntzen said.

Companies put up with such headaches because of the distinct advantages of producing in China, he said. The country had a huge pool of low-cost labor. It had little in the way of pollution controls, worker protections, or other regulations. As more factories were built there, they gave rise to an entire manufacturing ecosystem that often wasn't present and couldn't easily be duplicated anywhere else.

But China no longer offers many of those advantages, Arntzen and other supply-chain experts said. Although the country still has large pools of untapped labor in its interior, the labor market is relatively tight in the coastal areas that are home to much of its manufacturing base, he said. Worker pay has been rising and is now on par with Taiwan and other countries. And as it has become more affluent, China has started to put in place more stringent rules governing pollution and workplace safety.

"The shift to other locations is addressing the low-cost labor part" of the equation, said Abe Eshkenazi, CEO of the Association for supply chain management. "China is not low cost-labor anymore."

In that context, the Trump tariffs are like the straw that broke the camel's back. Companies already had reasons to move from China. The tariffs just made the situation more urgent.

"There has been a process underway long before these tariffs," Arntzen said.

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North Korean leader Kim Jong Un said he was "surprised" by President Donald Trump's abrupt Twitter invitation to meet him at the North-South Korean border on Sunday afternoon.

Surrounded by reporters inside a South Korean-controlled building at the border, Kim told Trump that some people speculated if the meeting was pre-arranged through official letters sent between the two leaders. Trump and Kim have exchanged numerous official letters during their tenure, some of which have not been publicly revealed.

"To be honest, I was surprised after I saw the president express his intention," Kim said, adding that he did not know until late afternoon that he would be "formally" meeting Trump.

Prior to leaving the G-20 summit in Japan, Trump tweeted he would be willing to meet with Kim at the Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea.

"After some very important meetings ... I will be leaving Japan for South Korea (with President Moon)," Trump said in the tweet. "While there, if Chairman Kim of North Korea sees this, I would meet him at the Border/DMZ just to shake his hand and say Hello(?)!"

Read more: 'This is a great friendship': Trump invites Kim Jong Un to the White House after crossing North Korean border to shake hands

"I just put out a feeler because I don't know where he is right now," Trump told reporters at the Imperial Hotel Osaka in Japan. "He may not be in North Korea."

North Korea's First Vice Foreign Minister Choe Son-hui responded to Trump's tweet and described it as "very interesting," adding that the country has "not received an official proposal in this regard," according to a Yonhap News report citing North Korea's state-run Korean Central News Agency.

Trump met Kim at the military demarcation line separating the border at around 3:45 p.m. local time and shook the leader's hand — a similar scene to that of the first summit between Kim and South Korean President Moon Jae-in in April 2018.

After the two leaders exchanged pleasantries, Kim welcomed Trump to step over the line and into the North Korean side of the border. Trump briefly stepped over the line and took several steps into North Korea, pausing to take several photos with Kim.

Trump became the first sitting-US president to step into North Korea. Photographers and videographers, including ones from North Korea, scrambled over each other to take footage of the historic moment, prompting security personnel to shout verbal warnings.

Trump and Kim later held a roughly 45-minute bilateral meeting at the Freedom House on the southern side of the DMZ. Following the meeting, Trump walked Kim back to the military demarcation line.

Trump told reporters he invited Kim to visit the White House in Washington DC: "At some point, it'll all happen."

A chilling new documentary created by two undercover reporters reveals the paranoia at the heart of China's 21st-century police state in Xinjiang, the western frontier region where authorities are cracking down on millions of Muslims.

The VICE News Tonight documentary shows dozens of police officers lining the streets of Xinjiang and repeatedly questioning the journalists, who had posed as travel bloggers in order to enter the region.

The documentary — titled "They Come For us at Night: China's Vanishing Muslims" — premiered Thursday night. It focuses on the plight of the Uighurs, a mostly-Muslim ethnic minority under intense surveillance and oppression by Beijing authorities in Xinjiang.

A line of uniformed police officers patrolling the streets of Xinjiang. VICE News Tonight

China justifies its crackdown by describing Uighurs as national-security threats, but experts say it could also be because Beijing wants to protect its infrastructure along the Belt and Road, a massive trade project connecting China with the rest of the world.

Uighurs in the region constantly live in fear of being detained and taken to one of China's prison-like camps, which authorities euphemistically call "free vocational training centers."

Former detainees in such camps have described being physically and mentally tortured.

Uighurs are not allowed to communicate with people outside the region. Uighurs living abroad previously told Business Insider of their anguish at being blocked by their families in Xinjiang to avoid getting arrested.

Read more: This man's family vanished in China's most oppressed region. The next time he saw his son was 2 years later, in a Chinese propaganda video.

Uighur men pray before a meal during the Corban Festival, also known as Eid al-Adha, in Turpan, Xinjiang, in September 2016. Kevin Frayer/Getty

The documentary shows the journalists repeatedly being stopped on the street and forced to delete all the footage on their phones, even as they insisted that they were tourists snapping photos for their own leisure.

Despite the heightened security apparatus in Xinjiang, the region has continued to attract tourists, but authorities say they can only take photos of sidewalks and tourist sites.

At one point in the documentary, two police officers who appear to be in anti-riot gear are seen stopping the reporters from talking to two local men in Kashgar, a major city in the region. Those two men, ironically, had been praising local law enforcement.

"Individuals cannot accept interviews without government approval," one police officer can be heard saying. "Especially in Xinjiang."

Police officers, who appear to be wielding weapons and wearing anti-riot gear, stopped undercover VICE News reporters from talking to local Chinese citizens on the street in Xinjiang. VICE News Tonight

Isobel Yeung, one of the VICE News reporters, told Business Insider: "I can't even count how many times we were stopped. It didn't help that I was constantly mistaken for a Uighur."

"Their goal was to keep close tabs on us, to track our every move, and to try to ensure we didn't take photos or video of anything the Communist Party of China considers sensitive," Yeung added. "They didn't know we were filming secretly."

Read more: 14 seconds of undercover footage reveals the shadowy, sinister reality of China's 21st-century police state

China's distrust of the Uighurs permeates into daily life. Authorities require residents to place QR codes on knives— even for those used in the kitchen — so they can track whether they are being used as weapon.

While visiting a wheat dumpling stall, the VICE News reporters also noticed that an axe for chopping firewood had been chained to the ground in accordance with regional rules.

An axe used to chop wood for fire chained to the floor at a wheat dumpling stall in Xinjiang. It symbolizes China's distrust of the region's Uighur citizens, whom Beijing claims are national-security threats. T. Wang / VICE News Tonight

China's ruling Communist Party regularly cracks down on content and people deemed unsavory to the regime. It believes that by censoring content and, in some cases, detaining dissidents, it is maintaining political and social stability.

Read more: Barging into your home, threatening your family, or making you disappear: Here's what China does to people who speak out against them

This paranoia is particularly evident in Xinjiang, with journalists having described being tailed by plainclothes officers — as many as six in the VICE News's case. The country has hired more than 100,000 new police officers over the past two years alone.

Reporters from The New York Times and Agence France-Presse have previously reported seeing police stage fake car crashes to disrupt their travels.

A sign taken in September 2012 in Yarkand county, Xinjiang, which says in both Arabic in Chinese: "Stability is a blessing, instability is a calamity." Eric Lafforgue/Art in All of Us/Corbis via Getty Images

Yeung, the VICE News correspondent, told Business Insider that being tailed by police "makes you paranoid to go places or say things."

"It does strange things to the mind, to know that there are people watching and listening to your every move," she said. "It makes you paranoid to go places or say things, even among my colleague and I and while in the comfort of our hotel rooms."

"I can only imagine what living there would do to you."

Watch a trailer for the documentary below:

Food delivery apps such as Uber Eats and Deliveroo are so ubiquitous that investors are betting millions of dollars that people will order takeaway from 'virtual' restaurants.

Although most people go onto food delivery apps to order from nearby physical restaurants, that poses a problem: these weren't set up to serve a massive influx of customers ordering food for takeaway at the same time.

Now founders have spotted an opportunity here and are creating an entirely new type of restaurant that only serves takeaway apps. There's no physical dining space, no waiters, no tables, chairs, crockery or cutlery, just chefs in 'dark kitchens' churning out food orders.

One example is Taster, set up by former Deliveroo executive Anton Soulier. The company has just raised $8 million in funding in a round led by US investor Battery Ventures, Heartcore Capital, and other backers. It operates in London, Paris, and Madrid.

If you log into the Uber Eats app and search for Taster, you won't find anything.

But search for 'Vietnamese', 'poke bowl' and 'fried chicken', then one of its three brands might pop up. But none of those brands — Out Fry chicken, Mission Saigon, or O Ke Kai — are real restaurants in the conventional sense. Instead they involve chefs working in kitchens operated either by Taster or rented from third parties like Karma Kitchen, while delivery drivers wait outside. For now, there's no way for passers-by to go into these spaces to sit down and eat.

CEO Soulier was employee number 10 at Deliveroo, helping the UK food delivery firm expand to France. By the time Deliveroo had grown to its tenth market, a realisation struck.

An Uber driver takes delivery of bags of donuts destined for a customer via Uber Eats in Sydney, Australia. REUTERS/Jason Reed

"The market was crazy, very big, the infrastructure, the logistics was here with Uber Eats, Deliveroo, Glovo and the other aggregators, but the restaurants weren't designed for delivery," Soulier told Business Insider. "Sometimes the food wasn't consistent, the experience wasn't consistent, the prep time was very long and actually I started thinking: 'How can we build a massive business if you rely on traditional restaurants?'

"So I began thinking that it's really time for restaurants to go online. And like an ecommerce brand could be built on Google or Facebook, it's time for a brand to build on top of these platforms."

And thus Taster was born. Of the firm's 115 employees, 100 are chefs. The costs saved from paying waiters and maintaining an expensive high street location go into technology and improving food quality, Soulier said.

He isn't alone.

Established London restaurateur Karam Sethi, whose restaurant group includes the prestigious Mayfair eatery Gymkhana, set up a Deliveroo-only restaurant called Motu last year.

Deliveroo also helps restaurateurs set up delivery-only brands for its platform, and has put aside funding to create its own 'virtual' restaurant brands.

Deliveroo CEO Will Shu. Deliveroo

Soulier and the investors pouring millions into these ventures are betting on two major trends.

The first is that restaurants as we know them are about to undergo a radical overhaul.

The thinking is that people will primarily go to restaurants for a higher end experience, while mid-range restaurants that cater to both a takeaway audience and a dine-in audience may struggle to retain loyal customers.

Soulier said: "[Restaurants] need to choose between delivery and the restaurant experience. The restaurants that will survive and do well will focus on decoration, the experience. On the other hand I think restaurants that do deliveries need to go all the way and do that."

The second major trend is that cooking will become more of a hobby, rather than an economic necessity.

The thinking here is that takeaway food will become so cheap, varied, and ubiquitous that it will be easier for most (middle-class) people than cooking from fresh.

Analysts at UBS were early to this trend, predicting in a research note last year that the kitchen would be dead by 2030.

Deliveroo CEO Will Shu has taken up the same line, saying recently: "I do see a world where, in maybe five or 10 years, cooking is purely a hobby."

Marcy Scott Lynn was one of the brains behind Facebook's famous feature that allows people to tag themselves as safe during disastrous events — and she remembers its inception vividly.

A group of Facebook engineers in Japan were originally responsible for the idea following the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami. One of the biggest earthquakes ever recorded, it killed 19,000 and caused a meltdown at the Fukushima nuclear power plant that displaced more than 100,000 others.

The trouble was, the engineers' brainwave came after the worst of the devastation. It was not until a Facebook hackathon that the idea came to resemble something like what we know now as Safety Check.

A two-person team made up of an engineer and project manager took inspiration from the work of their Japanese colleagues, presenting a more sophisticated iteration of the tool at the event. They got "a lot of love from the crowd," recalls Lynn, now Facebook's director of global impact partnerships.

Lynn was working on the policy team at the time, and got pulled onto the project along with a designer. She remembers the first time the feature got deployed as if it were yesterday. Three years after the 2011 Tōhoku disaster, Typhoon Ruby swept through the Philippines — and Lynn's team sprung into action.

"It's burned into my brain — I remember it, it was typhoon Ruby in the Philippines. We were prepared, we knew it was coming, we were watching the weather reports." Typhoon Ruby, also known as typhoon Hagupit, hit the Philippines in December 2014 forcing the evacuation of one million people.

Children sitting on a downed coconut tree following typhoon Ruby. VINCENT GO/AFP/Getty Images

"We had a meeting on [the] Friday... I just remember sitting in my home office with my daughter on my lap, we had all these people on video con, some people went into the office like 'is this gonna be it?'"

The team had painstakingly developed a set of criteria around which disasters would qualify for "mark yourself as safe," such as the number of people impacted, but actually setting the feature in motion required manual activation. "It literally required if it was in the middle of the night — which eventually it was — waking the on-call engineer to turn it on."

Scott says that until Facebook was able to automate the system, decisions on whether to activate the feature remained a "group effort." In its early days, the teams deciding whether to activate were cautious about overuse.

"Honestly I think originally we were probably biased towards fewer activations because we didn't want to inundate people. We didn't want Facebook to turn into a place where all that ever happened on there was 'disaster of the day,'" she explains.

Over time, however, the team gradually applied the feature to more disasters, including those created by humans, like the 2015 terror attack in Paris, France.

"We were able to really refine our thinking, we got a lot of help from outside experts in the humanitarian space to help us think through our criteria — especially as we tried to build a more automated product."

Since its inception, Safety Check has been activated for 1,400 crises, a Facebook spokesman says. It is one of a number of projects Lynn has been involved with aimed at making Facebook a force for good.

Lynn was promoted to director of global impact partnerships in July 2018. The department was totally new, and a year on, it's still in the process of figuring out what its role in the company is going to be, Lynn told Business Insider.

"We are talking to organisations like Unicef, like Save the Children about strategic partnerships. It's not normally money, this is not a philanthropy programme per se, but it's more about creating programmes," says Lynn, who answers to Facebook's VP of partnerships Ime Archibong.

Ime Archibong, Facebook's VP of partnerships. Getty

Lynn took up her new post as negative press about Facebook was starting to snowball. Since then, public sentiment towards the company has undoubtedly soured, and BI asked Lynn whether her job might be seen as whitewashing, pointing to worthy causes while problems like graphic content run rampant on its platform.

She describes the good Facebook can actively do in the world as the company's "handprint," whereas the passive effects of broad structural problems constitute its footprint. Lynn says the company is working hard to address both. "I don't see how we credibly operate in the social impact space without thinking about our footprint... I'm not sure we should only be doing one or the other," she says.

A concrete example of the kind of handprint Lynn wants to leave behind is Facebook's disease prevention maps, which the company announced in May. The maps use anonymised location data from the African continent to build up detailed maps of population density, which can then be used by rescue and medical officials during natural disasters or disease outbreaks. The data can be narrowed down to specific demographics, such as women or elderly people.

This map shows the population density of elderly people in Mozambique. Facebook

Facebook developed the maps in collaboration with the UN, which in turn led to Facebook joining 2030 Vision, a tech partnership whose members include the UN, Microsoft, and ARM. The stated aim of 2030 Vision is to deliver on the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals as laid out in 2015. It is not to be confused with Vision 2030, the name of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's economic drive in Saudi Arabia.

Lynn hopes to come up with lots more ways for her team to improve Facebook's handprint on the world. "We've done a bunch of smaller projects as we try to figure out what makes sense," she adds, although she feels joining Vision 2030 is her team's first really big step.

"We are still feeling our way," Lynn says.

In May this year, Russia passed a law to create its own parallel mirror version of the web that would allow the country to cut its web connections with the rest of the world but stay online internally. The measure is officially intended to safeguard Russia's ability to keep its internet running in the event of an attack. But it is widely regarded as a tool through which the Russian government will be able to take down part, or all, of the internet as traffic is funneled through points that the Russian government controls.

It turns out that ending internet service — web, email, social media, mobile phone data, apps — for an entire country is easier than you'd think. It happens frequently. And not just in corrupt dictatorships like Russia.

Hackers in the US once managed to take America's entire Eastern Seaboard offline for several hours.

Last year, there were 196 large-scale internet shutdowns in 25 countries, according to Access Now. India was the worst offender. It shut down the internet 134 times.

Here are all the recent occasions where someone has taken an entire country offline (or a major section of one), and why it happened.

Apple announced the resignation of its famed design chief Jony Ive on Thursday after his near-30-year tenure at the company.

The news of came as a shock to many including analysts who described Ive as "irreplaceable" and said his departure would "leave a hole" in the company. On hearing the news, Apple's stock dropped -0.87%, wiping out $8 billion of Apple's market cap.

But Ive's departure had been a long time in the making, according to Business Insider's Troy Wolverton who said that there have been "rumblings for years" that he could leave after he shifted focus from the day-to-day business of designing Apple's products.

A new report from Bloomberg's Mark Gurman revealed that Ive had been "shedding responsibilities" since the launch of the Apple Watch in 2015 and he came into Apple's headquarters as little as twice a week.

Sources familiar with the matter told Bloomberg that many of Ive's meetings moved to San Francisco, where he lives and has an office and studio set up, to avoid him having to make the one hour commute to Apple's headquarters in Cupertino, California. Other meetings were reportedly held at the homes of his employees or at hotels.

"This has been a long time in the making," one person familiar with the matter told Bloomberg, who wished to remain anonymous as they were not authorized to discuss Ive's resignation. "He's been at Apple over 25 years, and it's a really taxing job."

Steve Jobs. Sean Gallup/Getty Images

Ive is considered to be the mastermind behind Apple's biggest products, including the iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Mac, and iPod. He joined the company when it was on the brink of bankruptcy in the late 1990s and help turn it into the trillion-dollar company that it is today.

He was also a close confidant of Steve Jobs, Apple's late cofounder and former CEO, and reported directly to him.

"Most of the greatest debates at Apple happened between those two as they walked together," Matt Rogers, cofounder of Nest Labs who worked on iPhone and iPod software from 2007 to 2010, told Bloomberg.

Jobs and Ive would lunch together regularly and walk around Apple's headquarters making design decisions together, according to Bloomberg. When Jobs died in 2011, Ive became the most important person at the company, it added.

But his intense stint at Apple had reportedly begun to wear him down. "It's been an extremely tense 25 years for him at Apple and there's a time for everyone to slow down," the person who wished to remain anonymous told Bloomberg.

Ive is now going on to set up his own design company, called LoveFrom. Apple will be one of his new clients.

Apple needs to make clear its succession plan, and fast.

The departure of its longtime and beloved chief design officer, Jony Ive, will retrigger worries that the Cupertino firm is losing its mojo. Apple has quelled such jitters once before, when CEO Tim Cook took the top job after the death of Steve Jobs in 2011.

But Ive, described as the Lennon to Jobs' McCartney, is an equally important loss, being the man who essentially changed the way we consume media on the go with the invention of the iPhone, iPad, and other iconic hardware.

In a brief note to clients this morning, Wedbush analyst Dan Ives described this as a "major changing of the guard within Cupertino."

Pertinently, he wrote: "The major question now going forward is around future product innovation with one of the key visionaries of the Apple brand gone.

"In our opinion this news only adds to the current agita around the Apple story as the company is branching out into television and gaming all while it is currently the poster child for the US/China UFC trade battle on the heels of the G20 summit."

The "current agita" around Apple is that the firm is navigating life after the iPhone by altering its business model to focus on services, rather than hardware. It's too early to say whether this will be a successful pivot, but the extremity of the shift is underscored by Ive's departure.

Jony Ive. Getty Images/Michael Kovac

Ive is 52, and his exit makes it clear that Apple isn't coming up with a major new hardware invention any time soon.

Who within Apple is up for the challenge of the post-iPhone era? Cook is 58. Services chief Eddy Cue is 54. Software boss Craig Federighi is 50, while marketing boss Phil Schiller is 59. Angela Ahrendts, the former Burberry CEO who failed to kickstart Apple's retail operations, is 59 and was out of Apple after only five years.

Read more: Wall Street is mourning the exit of Apple's 'irreplaceable' design chief, but is not predicting an existential crisis

The issue isn't age, exactly. It's that most of these people have already got extremely rich off navigating Apple's golden era, when it appeared to be capable of endless invention. Have they got the appetite for another revolution, or like Ive, are they getting " deeply, deeply tired?"

One new area of innovation may be healthcare. Apple has marketed the Apple Watch as a product to get people moving, and pushed the device's abilities at catching heart irregularities. Another is augmented-reality, with Bloomberg reporting that its next big product will be AR glasses.

The Financial Times, which broke the news of Ive's departure, noted that Apple is scooping up lots of senior outside talent with different skills. Ex-Googler John Giannandrea now runs Apple's AI strategy, while Sony veterans Jamie Erlicht and Zack Van Amberg are helping the firm push into Netflix territory with original video.

Cook has said the firm does have a succession plan in place, although Apple never comments publicly on it. With Ive's departure marking a symbolic end to Apple's hardware days, it might be time to spread the news about new blood.

Wall Street is mourning the departure of one of Apple's most influential executives.

Design chief Jony Ive announced he was leaving the company on Thursday, bringing down the curtain on an illustrious 30-year tenure during which he was instrumental in iconic creations, including the iPhone.

Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reported that Ive's news was not a massive shock to close Apple watchers. The British executive, now 52, has complained of tiredness and reduced his office hours to just two days a week, Bloomberg said.

Nevertheless, his decision to set up his own firm was viewed as a blow to Apple — which is down roughly 1% in pre-market trading — by some top Wall Street analysts.

Despite Bloomberg's assessment of Ive shedding his duties, Wedbush's Dan Ives said his exit is a "surprise to the Street." He added: "Ive is leaving a hole in the company and is clearly irreplaceable as he has been one of the most important figures at Apple throughout the past few decades."

Read more: Apple's departed: Here's everyone who's left Apple recently

Deutsche Bank said Ive is second only to CEO Tim Cook in terms of his role in Apple's success. Analysts at the investment back added that they see "Ive's contributions to AAPL products as central to the company's design-centric strategy, which has propelled it to one of the largest companies in the world over the last 20."

Nomura took a similar view. In a note to clients, it said Ive's exit "should prompt much nostalgia, and may lead some investors to question Apple's ability to retain leading industrial design."

Both investment banks said there will be life after Ive, however.

Nomura said it was a "sensible" time to step back, amid Apple's efforts to lean into its services division. Apple's imperious approach to design and innovation "transcends a single individual," Nomura added.

In a more functional assessment, Deutsche Bank said: "We are confident that AAPL can find others internally to fill some of his responsibilities."

Wedbush, Nomura, and Deutsche Bank all noted that Ive is not going far. His new company LoveFrom will work closely with Apple, according to the designer. "Ive's legacy and Apple's design engine are both secure," Nomura said.

Apple lost its longtime design guru on Thursday with the news that Jony Ive is leaving the company to start his own firm.

Ive is responsible for the look and feel of Apple's most iconic products, from the iPod to the iPhone, and he was the executive who embodied the vision of founder Steve Jobs more than anyone else at the company.

Ive's exit follows the departure of several other high-level players at Apple, including the retail boss earlier this year. It's not exactly an exodus, given the depth of Apple's management team.

But the departures reflect a change in the company's top ranks and come at a time when Apple is shifting its focus from being a hardware maker to an internet "services" company.

Take a look at all the recent departures at Apple:

After a legendary 27-year run, Jony Ive is leaving Apple and starting a new firm, called LoveFrom.

It can't be overstated just how influential Ive was, and is, at Apple: "He has more operational power than anyone else at Apple except me," Steve Jobs once said of Ive.

When Ive first started at Apple in 1992, the company was seen by many as being on its last legs. Over the next few years, Ive would contribute his design expertise to products like the Newton, Apple's ill-fated personal digital assistant. He almost quit on several occassions.

But when Jobs made his triumphant return to Apple in 1997 and took over as CEO, Ive emerged as a key lieutenant and a major creative force in the reinvigoration of the company. Together, Jobs and Ive saved Apple from an ignominious fate, and brought it to its present position of massive market strength.

Ive's first big project with Jobs was the original, candy-colored iMac, launched in 1998. The success of that machine re-established Apple as a major innovative force in the PC market, and set the stage for Apple to blow everybody away with the MacBook, the iPod, and later, the iPhone — all of which Ive designed.

Now, it seems, Ive is ready for something new — though, it should be noted, his firm LoveFrom will continue working with Apple.

Here are the most iconic Apple products designed by Ive - the products that helped Apple recover from near-certain doom and establish itself as the premiere manufacturer of premium gadgetry.

After the late Steve Jobs, no one has had more influence on Apple than Jonathan Ive, the company's longtime design chief.

That's what made it all the more surprising when Apple announced Thursday that Ive was leaving the company. Ive will be launching his own independent design company, LoveFrom, and Apple will be one of its primary clients.

Ive has worked at Apple for 27 years. In that time, he received countless awards and accolades for his ingenuity and commitment to Apple's minimalist design aesthetic.

He has also become quite famous. The knighted London native is frequently spotted at clubs and lives in San Francisco, not terribly far from Apple's Cupertino headquarters. Ive's success at Apple has made him a household name and catapulted him into conversations about pop culture.

Here's what you need to know about Jony Ive, the famed Apple designer:

This is an update to a story by Sam Colt originally published in 2014.

When Apple announced that its long-time legendary design chief Jony Ive was leaving the company after 27 years, at least one analyst called it a "surprise to the Street" — which might account for the $8 billion hit Apple took to its market cap after the news broke.

"Ive is leaving a hole in the company and is clearly irreplaceable as he has been one of the most important figures at Apple throughout the past few decades; from his iMac vision to the stunning iPhone launch and transformation his fingerprints are deeply woven within Apple's core DNA," Dan Ives, managing director at Wedbush Securities, wrote in a note to clients following the news.

The analyst says that Ive's departure is a "major changing of the guard within Cupertino."

Still, he says, it "only adds to the current agita" around Apple, as it faces new challenges like an expansion into video streaming, slowing device sales, and the growing tech cold war with China.

"The major question now going forward is around future product innovation with one of the key visionaries of the Apple brand gone," Ives wrote.

Read more: Legendary Apple designer Jony Ive says that a conversation with Steve Jobs inspired the name of his new company LoveFrom: 'You are expressing your gratitude to humanity'

Still, Ives says, investors are not too concerned about Apple. Ive's new design firm LoveFrom, which has a name that stems from a conversation with Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, will have Apple as its first client. Ive plans to continue doing design projects for his former company, he told FT.

The possibility of ending partisan gerrymandering— the practice of redrawing voting districts in favor one party over another — was all but obliterated on Thursday, when the Supreme Court ruled in a 5-4 decision that challenges to the controversial practice cannot be heard in federal court.

In an impassioned dissent, Justice Elena Kagan warned that in the era of artificial intelligence, such a move could put American democracy at risk.

"Gerrymanders will only get worse (or depending on your perspective, better) as time goes on — as data becomes ever more fine-grained and data analysis techniques continue to improve," she wrote. "What was possible with paper and pen — or even with Windows 95 — doesn't hold a candle (or an LED bulb?) to what will become possible with developments like machine learning. And someplace along this road, 'we the people' become sovereign no longer."

While gerrymandering isn't new, machine learning — the process of making algorithmic predictions based on historical information, and a cornerstone of modern artificial intelligence development — certainly is. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and just about every other major tech company are making AI and ML core to their products and services, and the technology is increasingly available to software developers for use in their own projects.

Sophisticated computer programs are already being used to more efficiently "crack and pack" voting districts into arrangements more suitable for one party or another; to Kagan's point, the advent of machine learning means this is unlikely to slow down.

And if voting districts look strange now — often resembling stick-figure impressionist paintings, rather than distributed voter groupings — just imagine how they could appear when artificial intelligence is able to predict exactly which voters need to be in which districts in order for a specific party to win.

But Chief Justice Roberts did not seem perturbed by the possibility.

"We conclude that partisan gerrymandering claims present political questions beyond the reach of the federal courts," he wrote in his majority opinion. "Federal judges have no license to reallocate political power between the two major political parties, with no plausible grant of authority in the Constitution, and no legal standards to limit and direct their decisions."

Apple's chief design officer Jony Ive is leaving to start his own firm, the tech company announced Thursday.

"Jony is a singular figure in the design world," wrote CEO Tim Cook. "His role in Apple's revival cannot be overstated, from 1998's groundbreaking iMac to the iPhone and the unprecedented ambition of Apple Park."

Read more: Apple's longtime design chief Jony Ive is leaving the company

Ive's departure is just the latest blow in what's proving to be a difficult year for the tech giant. In January, Apple took the extraordinary measure of warning investors of lower-than-expected revenues for its holiday quarter— weeks before it actually reported its earnings.

"While we anticipated some challenges in key emerging markets, we did not foresee the magnitude of the economic deceleration, particularly in Greater China," wrote Cook in a letter to investors. "While it's disappointing to revise our guidance, our performance in many areas showed remarkable strength in spite of these challenges."

In May, the Supreme Court ruled that an antitrust class action lawsuit against the tech giant could proceed. The lawsuit accused Apple of using its "monopoly power to raise the prices of iPhone apps," according to a report by the New York Times. Previously, Apple had argued that "App Store customers technically buy apps from third-party developers and have no direct purchasing relationship with Apple, and therefore no standing to seek damages from the company," according to reporting by Wired. But the Supreme Court didn't buy it, saying instead that "consumers should be allowed to try to prove that the technology giant had used monopoly power to raise the prices of iPhone apps," according to the New York Times report.

It's also faced scrutiny abroad: In March, Spotify filed an antitrust complaint with the EU, claiming that Apple's practice of taking a 30% cut of most transactions in the App Store constituted anticompetitive behavior. Apple fought back, saying that Spotify couldn't have gotten where it is without the benefits afforded by the App Store platform.

"Spotify wouldn't be the business they are today without the App Store ecosystem, but now they're leveraging their scale to avoid contributing to maintaining that ecosystem for the next generation of app entrepreneurs," Apple said in a response to Spotify. "We think that's wrong."

The butterfly keyboards used in the most recent versions of the MacBook Pro also came under fire for an issue around stuck keys that prompted one prominent blogger to name them the "worst products in Apple history."

Then in June, two developers launched another lawsuit in San Jose, arguing that Apple "abuses the dominance of its App Store to make developers pay 'exorbitant' fees for premium apps and in-app purchases."

This all comes as Apple looks to reinvent itself as a services business as its devices businesses flatten out: Later this year, Apple will introduce Apple TV Plus, a premium paid movie and TV streaming service on which the company has pinned much of its hopes for a post-iPhone future. However, it's not clear how well Apple will be able to compete in a crowded video streaming marketplace dominated by the likes of Netflix and Amazon.

While Ive's departure will mark a difficult transition for the design team at Apple, which has benefitted from his leadership for decades, the real challenges may lie ahead.

At first blush, the departure of Apple's Jony Ive, its longtime design guru, would seem to be a big blow.

But the company will likely do just fine without him. In fact, the move could be an important opportunity for Apple to rethink the look and feel of its products for the first time in decades.

Ive is the famed designer who worked hand in hand with Apple founder Steve Jobs to shape the physical form of such iconic products as the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad. After Jobs' death in 2011, Ive was widely seen as the leading proponent inside the company for its former CEO's product vision and design sensibility.

That aesthetic has had the rare distinction of being critically praised, commercially successful, and widely copied. The iPhone largely defined the look and feel of smartphones, the most popular electronics product on the planet. And Ive has been recognized with numerous awards for his design prowess.

Although his departure was sudden, with no apparent warning to employees or immediate rumors before it in the press, it shouldn't be a big shock. Ive has been with Apple for nearly 30 years. The company is no longer the struggling upstart tech maker, but one of the biggest corporations in the world. In recent years, its focus has been moving away from designing breakthrough electronics products and toward services that it can sell alongside them, such as its streaming-music offering and its upcoming streaming-television service.

And there have been rumblings for years now that Ive hasn't been focused much on the day-to-day business of designing Apple's products. For years, his focus was instead reportedly on the designing of Apple's landmark new California headquarters, commonly referred to as the Spaceship for its circular design. He reportedly oversaw everything from the overall blueprint of the project to the finishing touches, such as the wood and stone used inside.

However much involved he was in designing Apple's products in recent years, Ive obviously cast a long shadow. The latest iPhones and Macs show the influence of his design sensibility, from their thinness to the solid feel of their cases. People can generally identify an Apple product even before they see the famous Apple logo, and that's largely thanks to Ive.

But Apple has continued to do well while Ive focused on other things, such as the Spaceship campus. Although its sales have fallen recently, that likely has much more to do with a maturing smartphone market than anything else.

Ive isn't going away completely. He won't leave Apple until sometime next year. And the iPhone maker will be one of the customers of his new design firm, according to the announcement Apple made of his departure.

But his move could prove to be beneficial for Apple. Much of the company's success has been built around making electronics fashionable, of emphasizing the importance of design. But it's probably high time for Apple to rethink and refresh its design aesthetic. After all, at least in their basic shape and form, the latest iPhones don't look all that different from the original, which came out in 2007. And the latest Mac laptops owe their basic design to the PowerBook notebooks Apple introduced way back in 2001.

Apple probably could stand to have someone take a fresh eye at its designs. Someone who isn't as committed to thinness as a guiding principle, for example, might be more willing to make space for a bigger, longer-lasting battery in Apple's phones or a case in which a camera protrudes because there's no room inside it. Someone who takes things a little less seriously or places a little less emphasis on elegance might channel the younger Ive's candy-colored Mac and iPod designs that were fun and light.

Such changes could go a long way to revitalizing Apple's brand and image. And who knows, maybe the company will find its next Jony Ive in the process.

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Apple's chief design officer Jony Ive announced Thursday that he will leave Apple to start his own design firm LoveFrom, with Apple as its first client.

Having Apple as a client isn't LoveFrom's only tribute to Ive's soon-to-be-former employer. The name LoveFrom is also a reference to a conversation Ive once had with Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, who was also one of his closest friends.

"There was an employee meeting a number of years ago and Steve [Jobs] was talking ," Ive said in an interview with FT.  "He [said] that one of the fundamental motivations was that when you make something with love and with care, even though you probably will never meet . . . the people that you're making it for, and you'll never shake their hand, by making something with care, you are expressing your gratitude to humanity, to the species."

Ive, known for designing legendary products including the iPhone, said that he identified with that motivation, and he was moved by Jobs' perspective. That, he says, is why he called his new company LoveFrom.

Ive plans to recruit Apple designer Marc Newson, his long-time collaborator, for his new firm, he told the FT. Together, Ive says, they will continue the work that they started at Apple.

Read more: Apple's longtime design chief Jony Ive is leaving the company

"Really it is the culmination of what I've learned and intend to continue learning from the last 30 years," Ive told the FT. "It will be a collection of creatives . . . from around the world that come from quite diverse areas of expertise."

Apple's valuation took a notable dip in after-hours trading on Thursday after its design chief Jony Ive announced he would be leaving the company.

Read more: Apple's longtime design chief Jony Ive is leaving the company

Upon news of Ive's departure, Apple's stock dropped about .087% in afterhours trading, as of the time of writing— which doesn't sound like a lot, but at Apple's scale, meant that it shaved off about $8 billion of its market cap. If the loss holds by the time of the opening bell on Friday, Apple will be worth about $910 billion.

In a statement on Thursday, Apple CEO Tim Cook tried to reassure employees and investors that the company's relationship with Ives — who's had his hand in designing countless Apple products including the iMac and iPhone — would remain close. Ive will be launching his own independent design firm, named LoveFrom, and Apple is said to be one of its primary customers.

"Apple will continue to benefit from Jony's talents by working directly with him on exclusive projects, and through the ongoing work of the brilliant and passionate design team he has built," Apple CEO Tim Cook said in a company statement. "After so many years working closely together, I'm happy that our relationship continues to evolve and I look forward to working with Jony long into the future."

So while investors don't seem to be especially spooked, given the relatively modest scale of the dip here, it still appears that Wall Street took notice.