Wonder what to call this brand of fanfic?
- Lisa Jackson, Apple’s vice president of environment, policy and social initiatives, and general counsel Kate Adams, are set to retire. While these may be high level execs, they don't really have much to do with the overall direction and success of the company. And given the change in the political environment you've seen tons of changes in roles like these at many companies in the past 11 months.
- Alan Dye, vice president of human interface design, is leaving to join Meta as its chief design officer. Sounds like he won't really be missed: https://9to5mac.com/2025/12/04/gruber-apple-employees-giddy-.... Assuming he was responsible for Liquid Glass, I say good riddance.
- John Giannandrea, senior vice president of machine learning and AI strategy, is also retiring. He had basically already been demoted, taken off leading Siri due to Siri's competitive failures.
So yeah, it's pretty obvious that Apple is behind the AI wave, but honestly, they may end up having the last laugh given how much backlash there is from consumers about trying to shoehorn AI into all these places where it's just an annoyance.
1) John Giannandrea, Senior VP of Machine Learning & AI Strategy, Apple’s AI chief is leaving in 2026 after setbacks with Siri, his entire team is being reorganized and cut.
2) Alan Dye, VP of Design and responsible for liquid glass left for Meta Bloomberg
3) Kate Adams, the top lawyer and general counsel is leaving
4) Lisa Jackson, VP of Policy & Social Initiatives also leaving
5) Johny Srouji, hardware/chip head, said he is "seriously considering leaving" which is really interesting seeing as he actually said that out loud for press to report on.
6) Jeff Williams, COO retired
7) Luca Maestri the CFO left ealier this year
8) Ruoming Pang the AI foundation leader left for Meta
9) Ke Yang, head of Siri search also left for Meta.
A lot of other AI engineers have also left.
3 and 4 literally don't matter.
5, 6 and 7 probably left / are going to leave because they got news they wouldn't get the CEO role once Cook retires.
2 is the big surprise that raises the most eyebrows.
Seems it's mostly succession drama with a side of failure @ AI.
Bad AI is a venial sin at Apple, but bad design is mortal. Or at least, it used to be.
if not Dye, then apologies to Dye for looking like that person.
also, there's this.
https://9to5mac.com/2025/12/04/gruber-apple-employees-giddy-...
While Apple wants its hardware to best run popular apps (AI included), it's premature to presume these people leaving for Meta (Dye in particular) have any impact other than tribal knowledge in their departures.
(disclaimer: was an engineer in an inner sanctum of apple for several years)
Foolishly, some of us still hoped Apple was better than that. And definitely better than this:
"Apple is bringing in Meta chief legal officer Jennifer Newstead to lead government affairs after Adams retires and serve as its new general counsel."
Mark Gurman @markgurman
BREAKING: Apple’s chip chief Johny Srouji informed CEO Tim Cook he is seriously considering leaving the company and would likely continue his career elsewhere rather than retire. Apple is urgently pushing to keep him. He remains at least for now.
Article source: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-12-06/apple-roc...
Dye may have also been involved in that, given how unpopular he was internally at Apple. But more likely just personal / Meta offered him a billion dollars. Maestri leaving was also probably totally uninvolved.
Srouji is the weirdest case, and I'm hesitant to believe its even true just given its a rumor at this point. Its possible he was angry about being passed over for CEO, but realistically, it was always going to be Ternus, Williams, or Federighi. If Ternus is the next CEO, its likely we'll see Apple combine the Hardware Technologies and Hardware Engineering divisions, then have Srouji lead both of them. I really do not see him leaving the company.
The other less probable theory is that they actually picked Fadell, and this deeply pissed off many people in Apple's senior leadership. So, what we're seeing is more chaos than it first seems.
Generally, as long as Srouji doesn't leave, these changes feel positive for Apple, and especially if there's a CEO change in early 2026: This is what "the fifth generation of Apple Inc" looks like. I don't understand the mindset of people who complain about Apple's products and behavior over the past decade, then don't receive this news as directionally positive.
> I don't understand the mindset of people who complain about Apple's products and behavior over the past decade, then don't receive this news as directionally positive.
It's time for change. Maybe it won't get better, but I do hope it will.
But they'll never get anyone even close to Jobs obviously. Just won't happen. Even if they find someone with the same attention to detail and "risk it all on a grand vision" mentality, he or she won't get the trust of the board who are generally risk-averse. The only reason Jobs got away with doing all that was that he was Mr. Apple. He was the company.
Hopefully they'll get someone closer to that but the magic will never come back IMO.
I’m not sure about Federighi’s popularity inside, but it seems like Software is in need of changes as well.
Short of Tim Cook being replaced, it just seems like disarray and things are falling apart at the seams, resulting in things only likely getting worse, not better.
If Tim Cook is indeed about to get replaced, then I think you might hear fewer complaints. But right now, the complaints are likely assuming a Tim Cook replacement isn’t part of the plan, or at the very least, not a guarantee.
If you’re wrong about a Tim Cook replacement, then I think the complaints may be justified.
What they point out is that a lot of Apple's senior leadership are of a similar age and are simply approaching retirement now. But they are also losing younger rising stars they desperately need to fill the ensuing void. At the moment, they are simply losing talent left and right, and that is unsustainable if they want to maintain their competitive edge and avoid completely turning into Microsoft.
The more likely explanation is that a certain amount of internal rot has set in. They haven't really launched a successful major new product category in years, and a lot of their initiatives have either stalled or failed. Something is clearly not right, and top tier talent doesn't will only tolerate that sort of thing for so long before moving on.
There was also a bit of a shakeup in one of their teams for video content production a few months back which surprised me. Not anyone that would get a tech journal article written about them, but someone who was very experienced, knowledgeable, and loved his role.
Nothing newsworthy just sounds more rocky than usual for Apple
Apple Rocked by Executive Departures, with Chip Chief at Risk of Leaving Next
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46175205
John Giannandrea to retire from Apple
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46114122
Apple Design Official Alan Dye Poached by Meta in Major Coup
The much bigger problem is that they've lost the wow factor in their software design, and in some regards the hardware as well even though the internals and build quality has never been better. Apple needs a design shakeup far more than it needs anything to do with AI, a poison pill which will bring the entire industry down in 2026.
If anything its laughable and points to the unoriginality of product creators that we haven't fundamentally transformed how we interact with technology given how much AI offers as functionality. Anyone (I'll bet 20% on Ive) who figures this out will eat Apple's dinner.
That doesn't bode well. The last thing I want from macOS is Windows-like overbearing insistence on AI everything.
Most critics I see deal with the fact that they’re fad chasing and delivering without their flagship polish (for both new products and updates). This narrative is likely to push apple deeper into the well if it becomes the mainstream spin.
OpenAI: Code Red
markus_zhang•9h ago
I wonder if he is responsible for all those niceties MacOS got for the last 10 or so years. Like the scroll bars in Serious Sam Mental difficulty, or the flat earth flavour icons, you know.
randycupertino•8h ago
markus_zhang•8h ago
nine_k•8h ago
(Unscientific fiction, I know.)
beAbU•4h ago
DonHopkins•55m ago
User defined colors not possible, only expensive premium licensed Pantone, Disney Princess Pink, Barbie Pink, Tiffany Blue, Coca Cola Red, Cadbury Purple, UPS Brown, Target Red, Home Depot Orange, John Deere Green & Yellow, Vantablack, Stuart Semple Black 2.0, 3.0, etc.
sharts•6h ago
TheOtherHobbes•56m ago
Looking forward to his tenure at Meta. With any luck he'll kill the company.
DonHopkins•44m ago
https://9to5mac.com/2025/12/04/gruber-apple-employees-giddy-...
Bad Dye Job
https://daringfireball.net/2025/12/bad_dye_job
>The sentiment within the ranks at Apple is that today’s news is almost too good to be true. People had given up hope that Dye would ever get squeezed out, and no one expected that he’d just up and leave on his own. [...]
>It’s rather extraordinary in today’s hyper-partisan world that there’s nearly universal agreement amongst actual practitioners of user-interface design that Alan Dye is a fraud who led the company deeply astray. It was a big problem inside the company too. I’m aware of dozens of designers who’ve left Apple, out of frustration over the company’s direction, to work at places like LoveFrom, OpenAI, and their secretive joint venture io. I’m not sure there are any interaction designers at io who aren’t ex-Apple, and if there are, it’s only a handful. From the stories I’m aware of, the theme is identical: these are designers driven to do great work, and under Alan Dye, “doing great work” was no longer the guiding principle at Apple. [...]
>That alone will be a win for everyone — even though the change was seemingly driven by Mark Zuckerberg’s desire to poach Dye, not Tim Cook and Apple’s senior leadership realizing they should have shitcanned him long ago. [...]
>My favorite reaction to today’s news is this one-liner from a guy on Twitter/X: “The average IQ of both companies has increased.”
https://x.com/8hipulin/status/1996318006335401997
"Dye [...] get[ting] squeezed out" of Apple is such vividly technicolor imagery!
I too hope he makes Meta curl up and dye.
npodbielski•7h ago
You mean they invisible? Also I had fun playing mental. Finished FE on it ;)
markus_zhang•7h ago
Then I watched someone doing a long play on Serious and I think that’s a superman.
apple4ever•7h ago
karmakaze•4h ago
markus_zhang•1h ago
TheNewsIsHere•1h ago
But software - even inside the business that makes an application people will still find entirely surprising, realistically unpredictable ways to use it. Let alone the customers/users/tinkerers.
At a former place I worked we had one customer who was smart enough to be technically correct about how our software worked to use it in the most insane manner any of us had seen, and which no one had ever contemplated. Not even in a way that was sane to test manually or with automation. (I’m being a bit vague because it’d be very identifiable broadly and specifically.) Eventually we had to say “yes you can use it this way, but you’d end up paying far more than you should and the experience is going to be awful.” (Even sales agreed on the former!)