John Ternus will officially replace Tim Cook as CEO of Apple next week, and a big leadership shakeup is expected to soon follow, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman.
It’s not that Apple is on hard times and Ternus is an avenging angel who has signaled some kind of executive bloodbath to come. In fact, the situation sounds much less exciting than that for Ternus, and mostly just arduous. In Gurman’s telling, Tim Cook was eased into the CEO role back in 2011 thanks to the stability afforded by a bunch of mid-career lieutenants supporting him. Ternus, on the other hand, gets no such good luck.
Some of this work was done for him ahead of the CEO transition. Ternus will inherit some recent hires in leadership—the new CFO and COO in particular, who aren’t exactly spring chickens. But much of the rest of Apple’s leadership is a fossilized collection of near-retirees, and it will apparently fall to Ternus to replace them over about the next three years, and hope for the best.
Gurman’s wording is unusually candid here:
“[..]a lot of Cook’s executive team has stayed at the company until their early- to late-60s (while becoming billionaires, or something close to it, along the way).”
So, per Gurman, Ternus will have to replace:
Johny Srouji
There’s been persistent chatter about Srouji leaving Apple since at least last December. That sounds stressful for Ternus since Srouji, SVP of hardware, has revolutionized Apple’s chip division, commonly known as Apple Silicon. Apple is in the process of rolling out fresh M5 Ultra and M6 chips, with next year rumored to see the release of the M7, M7 Pro, and M7 Max—a collection of absolute beasts, if the rumors are to be believed.
It was Srouji who integrated Apple’s chips and broader hardware divisions as the company’s reliance on Intel ended. Gurman says combined engineering and technologies leadership within a single mind is something that will likely disappear with Srouji’s departure. Good luck to Ternus of Srouji really does leave.
Deirdre O’Brien
O’Brien is an institution unto herself who joined the company in 1988, and heads Apple’s retail arm wile also being its VP of People (meaning the head of HR, basically). She saw the company through the Covid-19 pandemic, and sounds like she possesses immense institutional knowledge while running what sounds like half of the company. But Gurman says she’s likely on her way out, which sucks for Ternus.
Luca Maestri
Maestri is the recently replaced former CFO of Apple, but he’s currently working as the company’s “vice president of Corporate Services” which basically means he’s still hanging around overseeing things the current CFO, Kevan Parekh, apparently isn’t ready for yet, but Gurman suggests he’s probably leaving soon. Sounds tricky!
Greg Joswiak
Gurman notes that Joswiak is known internally as “Joz,” a riff on the nickname of Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, also known as “Woz.” Woz left the year before Joz joined.
The Apple website notes that Joswiak joined apple in 1986, “working on the early Macintosh computers.” So other than the 1984 commercial, pretty much everything you know about Apple marketing—in other words the creation of the most successful brand in history—has Joswiak’s fingerprints on it.
According to Gurman, Joz has a right-hand man named Bob Borchers, but Borchers is also eyeing retirement. Gurman says Apple is looking at “newly appointed head of artificial intelligence marketing Lilian Rincon and longtime iPhone marketing chief Kaiann Drance” as replacements.
