According to the Wall Street Journal, the members of Apple’s core industrial design team are leaving the company at a steady rate.

Deep throats told the Journal that Rico Zorkendorfer and Daniele De Iuliis have departed and Julian Hönig will be gone in the coming months.

These were the people who were famously shouted at by Steve Jobs and were the secret sauce to Apple’s success. After all, while anyone could put together cheap components and charge over the odds for them, Apple got away with it because the result looked good and people believed they were getting value for money.

The team were part of the small industrial design team known internally as ID. This is the group that has historically been led by Jony Ive, though he left his day-to-day role on ID in 2015 to help with the new Apple Park campus. Ive resumed leadership over the ID group in December 2017.

Part of the problem appears Apple’s retreat from hardware which has led to a reduction in their the ID group’s status in the Apple space ship. Any hardware which Apple is peddling has relied on the safe designs which have been around for ages.