Apple Is Hemorrhaging Vice Presidents

On Saturday came a report from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman that Johny Srouji, Apple’s senior vice president of hardware technology is looking to leave. Gurman, as usual, is reporting market-relevant information from anonymous sources, but the wording is tentative: Srouji is “considering leaving in the near future, according to people with knowledge of the matter,” and “has informed colleagues that he intends to join another company if he ultimately departs.”

So Gurman’s reporting won’t be proven false per se if Srouji stays put, and therefore please do not scream “Sell! Sell! Sell!” at your stockbroker, but Srouji’s departure from Apple, if it happens, will be part of a trend: extremely senior Apple employees leaving at a time when CEO Tim Cook himself has the Silicon Valley rumor mill abuzz about his own imminent departure—which Gurman says probably won’t happen until the middle of next year.

What’s going on with Apple’s vice presidents?

The past week has been brutal. John Giannandrea, senior vice president of machine learning and AI strategy, announced his coming retirement amid signs that Apple was scaling back its thwarted ambitions in the AI area by, for instance, purchasing AI software from Google in order to inject new life into Siri. Then Alan Dye, vice president of human interface design left for a job at Meta.

Also in the past week, Lisa Jackson, vice president for environment, policy, and social initiatives, announced her retirement. A non-vice president departure is also relevant here: general counsel Kate Adams left around the same time as Jackson, and both roles were folded into a new VP job called “SVP of general counsel and government affairs,” a job given to Jennifer Newstead who was poached from Meta (Some of Jackson’s duties will be “divided up among other executives” according to Gurman).

Why are people supposedly fleeing Apple?

Hey, stop it. They’re not fleeing. They’re organically retiring and changing jobs as far as anyone knows.

But if there’s a crisis happening in Cupertino, and it’s not just the fact that last year Apple’s boldest new product in a decade turned out to be a flop, and the latest iOS redesign is unpopular, and the company can’t seem to figure out what to do with AI, an obvious issue to point out might be this: Tim Cook appears to have been unusually busy for the past few months trying to do jobs that are not a natural fit for him.

This past summer, Apple’s COO Jeff Williams left. Williams had been acting as Cook’s right-hand man, and was regarded as more of a product design expert than Cook. It then emerged that Cook would simply take over Williams’ duties rather than replace him, which raised the eyebrows of Silicon Valley watchers, who regard Cook as more of a logistics guy who traditionally makes the company a money machine in part by leaving the creativity up to other people.

Forecasts say, the next few years will bring innovation mostly to the iPhone itself. More big swings like the Vision Pro are probably not forthcoming. That being the case, it may be notable that all across Apple, as Gurman points out, “veteran executives are nearing retirement age.”

So the culture at Apple, in short, may have been getting a little stagnant, with its reliance on familiar products, and, indeed, faces. Whether it’s the intention or not on Apple’s part, a sudden infusion of fresh blood could be a long overdue treatment for what’s ailing this $4.2 trillion company.