If you thought the golf cart was destined to remain just a golf cart, designed for the fairways, fancy resorts, and offices too big to get around on foot, think again. Veteran Apple designer Julian Hoenig – a man who spent years in Apple’s industrial design studio, worked under Steve Jobs and Jony Ive, and had a hand in designing the Apple Watch and Apple Vision Pro while helping to shape the now-shelved Apple car project – had much bigger plans for it.
The result is the Amble One. No doors, no screens, a cork-wrapped steering wheel, and the general vibe of what you’d expect NASA’s Lunar Roving Vehicle to resemble if it retired to the Algarve. Built from aluminium, leather, canvas, and cork, and capable of trundling along at a stately 40mph for over 60 miles, it’s everything you’d want your next ride to the 18th hole to be, and more. Co-designer Michael Tropper told Bloomberg the Amble One was initially hacked together in the “simplest possible way”, but, given that people reportedly mistook it for a moon buggy while it was being towed through town, that feels like a huge undersell.
The Amble One isn’t a one-off, though. It might be Hoenig’s first major project outside his time at Apple, but he isn’t the first ex-Apple designer to leave Cupertino only to pop up elsewhere, adding a little sparkle to otherwise ordinary objects. Thermostats, coffee mugs, pins, golf carts – nothing is safe. Here are five more examples of products rejuvenated by designers with Apple on their CVs.
The Nest Learning Thermostat, by Tony Fadell
Before there was a standard golf cart, there was a boring thermostat. At least, until Tony Fadell came along. He spent nearly a decade running Apple’s iPod and iPhone hardware teams before leaving Apple in 2010 and co-founding Nest Labs the same year. Nest is now owned by Google after it was acquired for $3.2 billion in 2014, but before that, the smart home company put its name on the map with the Nest Learning Thermostat.
This round brushed-steel dial, with its gorgeous LCD screen, humiliated every beige plastic box that had previously graced hallways. It learned your schedule, adjusted itself to save you money, and it was far beyond its time when it came to smart heating. Tony Fadell left Nest in 2016, but the Nest Learning Thermostat lives on (the latest generation even fancier than the original), continually reminding us that a thermostat doesn’t need to be an ugly white box on your wall.
The Ferrari Luce, by Sir Jony Ive
While Hoenig took the ‘less is more’ approach for his golf cart, Sir Jony Ive was in an entirely different lane when he designed the Ferrari Luce. Arguably Apple’s most prolific designer, having been there for almost 27 years, Ive left the company in 2019. He then founded LoveFrom with renowned industrial designer Marc Newson, and, among a few other projects, spent the last few years working with Ferrari on Luce, the marque’s first fully electric car.
Revealed in Rome earlier this year, the Ferrari Luce is a five-seat, four-door car, priced from around $640,000/£470,000 (though the first production model recently sold at auction for $40 million). Interestingly, the cabin features a number of physical switches despite being electric, with Ive believing that going electric shouldn’t automatically mean all-digital. The result is a car with fewer touchscreens than a Tesla, despite Ive having being responsible for some of the most famous touchscreens in the world.
The Syng Cell Alpha, by Christopher Stringer
Perhaps not as famous as Sir Jony Ive, but Christopher Stringer spent over two decades on Ive’s design team, working on everything from the original iPhone to the HomePod, before leaving Apple in 2017. Four years after leaving, Stringer resurfaced with Syng, a speaker company whose debut product looked more like a prop smuggled off the set of a sci-fi film than a speaker.
It’s a transparent sphere that uses three internal microphones to map the room it’s in and tailor its sound accordingly – a party trick Syng calls ‘Triphonic’ audio. When it launched in 2021, it was dubbed the “world’s first triphonic speaker”, and the company recommended buying three of them. At a cost of $1,799 (about £1,270), that’s no small ask, though depending on how much the folding iPhone sets you back, it might be cheaper than one of those.
The Ember mug, by Robert Brunner
Robert Brunner ran Apple’s industrial design department from 1989 to 1996, hiring a young Jony Ive along the way, before founding his own studio, Ammunition, in 2007. Since then, he hasn’t just had a hand in one product you will no doubt have come across, but in a couple. The first was the original Barnes & Noble Nook e-reader, which launched in 2009 as the company’s answer to Amazon’s Kindle.
Six years later, Brunner’s Ammunition studio turned its attention to the coffee cup. The Ember mug is a coffee cup with a heating element, a companion app, and a base dial that lets you fine-tune your flat white to the exact temperature you want. Some may consider it a little over-kill for something built to hold a hot drink, but if you thought the biggest issue in modern coffee culture was insufficiently precise lukewarmness, the Ember mug is your answer.
Humane AI Pin, by Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno
Not every ex-Apple project ends in triumph, and the Humane AI pin is the cautionary tale on this list. Founded by married couple Imran Chaudhri, who spent over two decades shaping the iPhone’s interface before leaving in 2017, and Bethany Bongiorno, a former Apple software director, Humane revealed its $699 wearable in November 2023. The pitch was that it would “reimagine the human-technology relationship,” as reported by the BBC, but when it started shipping the following spring, it didn’t receive the greatest reviews.
Clipped to your lapel, the Humane AI Pin projected a laser display onto your palm, letting you talk to an AI assistant instead of looking at a screen, send messages and take photos and videos. Unfortunately, reviewers reported overheating, noted it was “bad at almost everything it does, basically all the time”, and could only be trusted to tell the time and nothing else. HP then bought most of the company’s assets for $116 million in 2025, and that was the end of that.
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