Apple Is Hemorrhaging Vice Presidents

On Saturday came a report from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman that Johnny Srouji, Apple’s senior vice president of hardware technology, is looking to leave. As usual, Gorman is relaying relevant market information from anonymous sources, but the wording is tentative: “Suruji is considering leaving in the near future, according to people familiar with the matter,” and “he has informed colleagues that he intends to join another company if he eventually leaves.”

So, Gorman’s reports will not be proven false per se if my saddles remain where they are, so please don’t scream “Sell! Sell! Sell!” At your stockbroker, but Suruji’s departure from Apple, if it happens, will be part of a trend: senior employees leaving Apple at a time when CEO Tim Cook himself is sparking rumors in Silicon Valley about his impending departure — which Gorman says probably won’t happen until the middle of next year.

What’s happening with Apple’s vice presidents?

This past week has been brutal. John Giannandrea, senior vice president of machine learning and AI strategy, announced his upcoming retirement amid signs that Apple was scaling back its frustrated AI ambitions, for example, by purchasing AI software from Google in order to breathe new life into Siri. Alan Day, Vice President of Human Interface Design, then left to work at Meta.

Also last week, Lisa Jackson, vice president for environment, policy and social initiatives, announced her retirement. The departure of the non-VP position is relevant here as well: General Counsel Kate Adams left around the same time as Jackson, and both roles were combined into a new VP job called “Senior Vice President of General Counsel and government Affairs,” a job given to Jennifer Newsted that was stolen from Meta (some of Jackson’s duties will be “split among other executives” according to Gorman).

Why are people supposedly fleeing Apple?

Hey, stop it. They don’t flee. They organically retire and change jobs As far as anyone knows.

But if there’s a crisis going on in Cupertino, and it’s not just the fact that Apple’s boldest new product in a decade flopped last year, that its latest iOS redesign is unpopular, and the company can’t seem to figure out what to do with AI, the obvious problem to point out might be this: Tim Cook seems to have been unusually busy over the past few months trying to do jobs that don’t naturally suit him.

Last summer, Apple’s COO, Jeff Williams, left. Williams served as Cook’s right-hand man, and was viewed as more of an expert in product design than Cook. It then turned out that Cook would simply take over for Williams rather than replace him, surprising Silicon Valley observers, who view Cook as little more than a logistics guy who has traditionally made the company a money machine in part by leaving innovation to other people.

Expectations are that the next few years will bring innovation mostly to the iPhone itself. There probably won’t be any more big swings like the Vision Pro. In this case, it may be notable that throughout Apple, as Gorman points out, “veteran executives are approaching retirement age.”

So, in short, the culture at Apple may have become a bit stagnant, with its reliance on familiar products and faces. Whether it was the intention or not on Apple’s part, the sudden influx of new blood could be a long-awaited cure for what ails this $4.2 trillion company.