Apple is currently undergoing the most extensive executive shakeup in recent history, with a wave of senior leadership departures marking the company’s most significant management shakeup since the death of visionary co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs in 2011. The leadership departures, which span key departments from artificial intelligence to design, legal affairs, environmental policy and operations, will have a significant impact on the direction of Apple for the foreseeable future.
On Thursday, Apple announced that Lisa Jackson, vice president of environment, policy and social initiatives, and Kate Adams, the company’s general counsel, will retire in 2026. Adams has served as Apple’s chief legal officer since 2017, and Jackson joined Apple in 2013. Adams will resign at the end of next year and Jackson will leave next month.
Jackson and Adams join a growing list of executives who have left or announced their exits this year. AI CEO John Giannandrea announced his retirement earlier this month, and his design chief Alan Dye, who was responsible for Apple’s most important user interface design after Jony Ive left the company in 2019, was poached by Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta just this week.
The scope of turnover is unprecedented in the Tim Cook era. In July, Apple COO Jeff Williams, long considered to succeed Cook as CEO, decided to retire after 27 years with the company. A month later, Apple Chief Financial Officer Luca Maestri also decided to resign. The design department that just lost Dye also lost senior design director Billy Sorrentino, who left Meta with Dye. However, the situation in Apple’s artificial intelligence team is particularly turbulent: Pang Ruoming, head of the artificial intelligence basic model team, went to Meta in July, taking about 100 engineers with him. Ke Yang, who led Siri’s artificial intelligence-driven network search, and Zhang Jian, Apple’s director of artificial intelligence robots, also left Meta.
While all of these departures are a big deal for Apple, the timing may not be a coincidence. Both Bloomberg and financial times Apple is reportedly stepping up its succession planning efforts to prepare for Cook, who has led the company since 2011 and is set to retire in 2026. Cook, who turns 65 in November, has seen Apple’s market capitalization grow from about $350 billion to as much as $4 trillion during his tenure. Bloomberg John Ternus has reportedly emerged as the leading internal candidate to replace him.
Apple’s selection of Ternus would be a significant departure from Apple’s approach over the past decade, which has been to have people with operational backgrounds and deep understanding of global supply chains lead the company. At the same time, Ternus focuses on hardware development, especially the development of iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple Watch. But it’s this technical expertise that makes him an attractive candidate, especially as recent criticism of Apple has centered around the company’s entry into new product categories (Vision Pro, as well as the ill-fated Apple Car) and its efforts in artificial intelligence.
