CEO John Ternus wants Apple to be leaner, more experimental and to launch products faster

New CEO John Ternusused to be Apple’s SVP of Hardware Engineering, while Tim Cook was a sales guy. We are now starting to see how Ternus’ leadership will be different from Cook’s –Bloomberg’sMark Gurman reports that Ternus wants to create a “leaner organization” that is focused on engineering. “Leaner” means that there will be some downsizing – apparently, Ternus wants to reduce the number of middle management positions to give engineers a more direct connection to the senior executives. Over the last couple of weeks, Apple has been reportedly reducing the number of engineering program managers. These are the people who coordinate different teams and are crucial for product development. They weren’t let go directly but were given some time to find other jobs at Apple – those that can’t find a new position will be laid off later this year. Ternus has also canceled a number of products that were in development, which caused several small layoffs. Some of the affected teams were the ones working on Siri, AI-related projects and the Apple Vision Pro XR headset.

Things don’t always go to plan – Apple was reportedly looking to cut 5,000 AppleCare employees, which were supposed to be replaced by AI. The company changed its mind, however, and will not be replacing AppleCare workers with AI, at least for now. Ternus believes that Apple should be more efficient – that it should do more with fewer employees. He also believes that Apple should become more experimental in its projects and that it should release products more often. To that end, he may retire the traditional schedule of having a big September product launch every year with some products announced in the Spring. We’re already seeing that, partially – the September iPhone launch only featured the Pro models and the new Duo. The vanilla iPhone and the new Air will be announced next year.

In addition to hardware, the head executives at Apple want to launch new services to bring in more revenue from existing products. The App Store, which has been a cash cow for Apple, isunder pressurefrom regulators in the US, the EU, Japan and elsewhere, so revenue growth is slowing down – Ternus, Eddy Cue (SVP of Services and Health) and CFO Kevan Parekh are discussing potential new services. Source(paywall) |Via