The ever-growing group of people who scrutinise Apple’s internal politics are poring over the announcement that Sir Jonathan Ive has been promoted to chief design officer. For tech kremlinologists, it raises questions about the 48-year-old Briton. Is he on the way out as well as up? Is it his own choice? Or does it mean that he’s going to devote more time to a huge future project such as the rumoured Apple car?

Such entrail-reading is not a trivial matter. Showing off the first iPhone in January 2007, Steve Jobs demonstrated how the user could list contacts. Apple’s founder and then chief executive showed a list of “favorites”, all of them Apple staff, including Tony Fadell, who had been key in developing the iPod that had revived Apple’s fortunes over the previous six years. Then he showed how to delete contacts – just one: “I can just remove Tony. Boom!”

Those who study Apple closely gasped – to them, that simple gesture meant that Fadell was out of favour. And sure enough, within two years he was gone, having earlier lost out in the power struggle to provide the software for the iPhone to Scott Forstall, who had headed Jobs’s onstage list.

Apple’s chief executive, Tim Cook, called Ive’s new position – a change from his prior post of Apple’s senior vice-president of design – “exciting”. The role apparently involves more than overseeing the design of software and hardware, as Ive had already been doing. In an internal email to staff, Cook said: “Design is one of the most important ways we communicate with our customers, and our reputation for world-class design differentiates Apple from every other company in the world. As Chief Design Officer, Jony will remain responsible for all of our design, focusing entirely on current design projects, new ideas and future initiatives.”

But does that mean the softly-spoken Ive, who has been at Apple since 1992, is more important now, or less? Neil Cybart, a former Wall Street analyst who now runs his own Above Avalon consultancy studying Apple, told the Guardian that the new role “is the closest thing yet to the unofficial role that Steve Jobs held at Apple” as the ultimate guardian of its products.

Ive, he says, “now has more time to look at the big picture, although there is plenty of evidence to suggest he will remain focussed on the details as well”. Jobs was famously obsessed with detail: he once rang up a Google executive on a Sunday morning because the green in the Google Maps icon on the iPhone didn’t exactly match that on its website.

Ive, too, focuses on elements that some think too trivial to bother with in his search for perfection. But Apple has clearly been signalling through media interviews that its design capabilities don’t rest only with him. A New Yorker interview in February was granted access to the design lab, and the point was gently made that any product is the result of multiple efforts, not just Ive sketching at a table. Other names – Richard Howarth, now in charge of industrial design, and Alan Dye, in charge of user interface design – have spoken to the press ahead of their promotion this week.

Ive has been spread thin, as Cook pointed out: working not just on hardware and software but also the appearance of retail stores, the new “spaceship” campus in Cupertino, product packaging and other things.

Now it seems he might take a role similar to Sergey Brin’s at Google, where the co-founder tends to look into the distant future to determine which way to invest resources. Ive could be deciding whether Apple should be working on a car, or whether it should be ignoring the noise and looking at the smart home or smart office. Appropriate, for a man with a poster on his office wall which concludes: “Think about all the fucking possibilities.”

And who told the New Yorker’s writer: “So much of our manufactured environment testifies to carelessness.”

Richard Windsor, an industry consultant, said: “I also suspect that there may be a degree of succession planning going on here. Tim Cook is no Steve Jobs and he was never meant to be. Perhaps Jony Ive can one day fill those shoes”.

But others disagree. Ben Thompson, an independent consultant who runs the Stratechery blog, said the move makes sense, given the importance of design to Apple, but added: “It’s significant that Ive is giving up management responsibilities – unpleasant though they may be, management is how stuff actually gets done. To not be a manager is to, in the long run, not have influence.”

For that reason, he thinks Ive is gently, and gradually, ambling towards the exit door. Thompson said: “I think this is the beginning of the end. He’s certainly earned the long fade; I do think Apple – in part because of Ive – has the culture and talent to not miss a beat.”

That culture is essential to any company’s survival. Over the weekend, the Wall Street Journal ran an extract from Losing the Signal, a forthcoming book about the fall of BlackBerry, where the chief executives saw Jobs’s iPhone introduction but concluded there was no need to worry; it wasn’t a viable or worthy competitor. At Apple, Cook and Ive will be aware of the dangers of that complacency. Ive’s move could be a guard against just that.

Design hits: Jony Ive’s five biggest design icons

• Original Apple PowerBook 140 (1991). Ive was still working at the British design company Tangerine, at a time when Apple outsourced design. The first laptops look clunky by modern standards, but set a standard for the market. Ive left Tangerine in frustration after plumbing company Ideal Standard rejected his bathroom product designs as too costly and modern-looking.
• Original iMac (1997). The “Bondi Blue” iMac, an all-in-one computer, was friendly, accessible and rounded at a time of “beige boxes”. It revived Apple’s fortunes in the PC market. The translucent blue cover required a new manufacturing technique but was quickly copied by many other companies – both things that would be repeated many times in future.

• Original iPod (2001). The scroll wheel wasn’t Ive’s invention, but the non-removable silver back and rounded shape all were. Ive had been working on designs for an MP3 player before Apple greenlighted the project.

• iOS 7 (2013). Ive was put in charge of software as well as hardware at the end of 2012. To revive the iPhone and iPad software, which had dated-looking “faux leather” and “paper” icons, he came up with a more colourful and abstract interface that used gestures such as “swipes” to move between screens. Many critics hated it; customers loved it.

• iPhone 6 (2014). The eighth incarnation of Apple’s iPhone line broke away from small screens to embrace a 4.7in screen, and is its thinnest and best-selling ever. The “swiping” interaction of iOS 7 from the year before is key to easy use of the big screen – indicative of how carefully Apple lays the foundations for change.