Apple Restructures Hardware and Design Leadership Ahead of CEO Transition

As Apple prepares for its most significant leadership transition in over a decade, incoming Chief Executive Officer John Ternus is already executing a sweeping reorganization of the company’s product development engine. Set to formally succeed Tim Cook on September 1, 2026, Ternus is inheriting a corporate structure that has heavily favored operations and finance over the past ten years. Now, in a bid to prepare Apple for its next era of spatial computing and artificial intelligence, Ternus and newly elevated Chief Hardware Officer Johny Srouji are fundamentally reshaping how the company builds its devices. The dual-pronged restructuring aims to restore the diminished authority of Apple’s legendary industrial design team while simultaneously tightening the integration between custom silicon engineering and final product design.[1][2][8]

The most culturally significant aspect of the shake-up centers on Apple’s industrial design studio, a group that once operated with unmatched autonomy and influence. During the era of co-founder Steve Jobs and former design chief Jony Ive, the industrial design team dictated the company’s product roadmap from the top down. Designers worked in a highly secretive studio, conceptualizing the look, feel, and materials of devices like the iMac, iPod, and iPhone, while engineering teams were tasked with making those visions a physical reality. Jobs famously structured the company so that Ive wielded more operational power than anyone else at Apple, establishing a design-first philosophy that became the envy of the consumer technology industry.[2][3][5]

However, that dynamic steadily eroded over the past decade. The shift began when Ive stepped back from day-to-day management in 2015 and accelerated when he formally departed Apple in 2019 to found his independent firm, LoveFrom. Under Tim Cook’s leadership, oversight of the design team eventually fell to Chief Operating Officer Jeff Williams. This structural change meant that the design group no longer had a dedicated seat at the executive leadership table. Instead of driving the company’s vision, the studio increasingly functioned as an internal service bureau, where other departments would request specific design work to fit predetermined operational and financial constraints.[1][3][5]

The subordination of design to supply chain logistics took a heavy toll on the studio’s talent pool. Following the departure of Evans Hankey, who briefly managed the studio after Ive, Apple experienced a mass exodus of veteran designers. Nearly every senior designer from the Ive era eventually left the company, with many defecting to LoveFrom or launching their own ventures. The team was gradually repopulated with more junior staffers, leaving the organization with less influence and internal credibility than at any point in modern Apple history. The lack of a singular, empowered design visionary at the executive level led to occasional criticism that Apple’s hardware updates had become overly iterative and predictable.[3][5][6]

The talent drain has been exacerbated by aggressive recruitment from well-funded competitors and familiar faces. Jony Ive’s LoveFrom has successfully lured away several key Apple designers to work on a highly anticipated, AI-native hardware project in collaboration with OpenAI. This external pressure has forced Apple to take defensive measures. In recent months, the company has reportedly offered substantial financial retention bonuses to select members of its design organization to prevent further defections. Retaining institutional knowledge has become a critical priority as the company attempts to stabilize the studio and prevent its remaining senior staff from joining the very rivals attempting to disrupt Apple's hardware dominance.[1][3]

Ternus, who comes from Apple’s product engineering ranks, has recognized the cultural deficit and is preparing a major intervention. Since taking oversight of the industrial design group in late 2025, he has spent considerable time embedded with the team. In a recent internal meeting, Ternus explicitly promised employees that the company would reaffirm its commitment to aesthetics, stating that design is core to what we do at Apple. He emphasized that the most beautifully designed object most consumers own is an Apple product, and pledged to ensure that standard remains intact. To execute this vision, Ternus is expected to elevate the design team's authority, potentially restoring a direct line to the CEO and empowering recently appointed Vice President of Industrial Design Molly Anderson to rebuild the studio's senior bench.[2][3][6]

While Ternus works to revitalize the visionary side of Apple’s hardware, Johny Srouji is executing an equally aggressive restructuring of the practical engineering side. Srouji, the architect behind Apple’s highly successful transition to custom M-series and A-series silicon, was recently promoted to Chief Hardware Officer. His mandate is to eliminate internal bottlenecks and accelerate the development of future devices by forcing a tighter marriage between the teams designing the physical products and the engineers building the chips that power them. As Apple pushes deeper into computationally intensive fields like on-device artificial intelligence and robotics, Srouji believes that custom silicon must be developed in lockstep with the hardware chassis.[4][7][8]

To achieve this integration, Srouji has completely reorganized the management of Apple’s product design division. It is important to distinguish this group from the industrial design studio: while industrial designers conceptualize the overall vision and appearance of a device, the product design team focuses on the complex mechanical engineering required to translate those concepts into mass-producible, shippable products. In the most significant shift, veteran Vice President Kate Bergeron is stepping away from her role leading the overall product design group. Bergeron, a longtime deputy to Ternus, has been promoted to a newly created position overseeing product reliability and materials development across the entire Apple ecosystem.[4][7][9]

With Bergeron shifting focus, the day-to-day management of product design is being divided among specialized leaders. Shelly Goldberg, who previously managed Mac product design, is expanding her portfolio, while Dave Pakula is taking over the engineering efforts for the Apple Watch, iPad, and AirPods. Richard Dinh will retain his leadership over iPhone product design. By flattening the reporting structure and empowering these specialized deputies, Srouji aims to reduce bureaucratic layers and enable faster decision-making. This streamlined approach is designed to ensure that each major product category has dedicated engineering leadership capable of working directly with Srouji’s silicon architects.[7][8][9]

Srouji’s expanded purview also extends into Apple’s most experimental hardware categories. Two former deputies of Ternus—Matt Costello and Kevin Lynch—will now report directly to the Chief Hardware Officer. Costello is taking charge of a new Ecosystems Platforms and Partnerships team, while continuing to oversee Apple’s home and audio products. Lynch, meanwhile, is heading up a special projects group focused heavily on robotics and emerging technologies. By bringing these forward-looking divisions under Srouji’s direct control, Apple is signaling that its future bets in smart home automation and robotic assistants will be fundamentally driven by the capabilities of its custom silicon.[4][7][8]

The reorganization under Srouji also pushes deep into the component level, consolidating control over the granular technologies that dictate user experience. Sribalan Santhanam, the head of silicon engineering, is taking on expanded oversight of Apple’s chip packaging and analog mixed-signal technologies, including teams based in Israel. Meanwhile, Zongjian Chen, leader of the Advanced Technologies Group, is gaining authority over battery engineering, camera hardware, display engineering, and sensor software prototyping. Chen is also taking over Apple’s long-running, highly secretive project to develop a noninvasive blood-sugar monitor for the Apple Watch. By placing these disparate component teams under unified leadership, Srouji is ensuring that every sensor, battery, and display is custom-tailored to the specific power and thermal profiles of Apple's silicon.[7][8]

The broader implications of this dual restructuring point to a distinct philosophical shift for the Ternus era. While Tim Cook’s tenure was defined by operational excellence, supply chain mastery, and the massive expansion of high-margin digital services, Ternus appears intent on returning Apple to its roots as a hardware-first engineering powerhouse. By simultaneously empowering the industrial designers to dream up radical new form factors and giving the silicon chief total control over product engineering, Apple is attempting to recreate the friction and synergy that defined its most innovative years. The ultimate goal is to ensure that the company’s next generation of devices—whether they are foldable iPhones, AI-powered wearables, or home robotics—are not compromised by operational caution.[2][5][8]

Despite the clear strategic intent, significant uncertainties remain about how this new structure will perform in practice. Rebuilding the industrial design studio’s prestige will require more than just an organizational chart change; it demands recruiting top-tier global talent in a highly competitive market where rivals like OpenAI are aggressively poaching hardware experts. Furthermore, while Srouji’s engineering-led approach guarantees that future Apple devices will feature industry-leading performance and efficiency, it remains to be seen whether a culture dominated by chip architects can seamlessly coexist with a revitalized, artistically driven design studio. As Ternus prepares to take the helm in September, the technology industry will be watching closely to see if Apple can successfully balance the competing demands of silicon engineering and pure design.[1][3][6]