Apple CFO transition? Check! CEO transition?
Apple looks to be conducting a relatively painless transition for its Chief Financial officer. Current CFO Luca Maestri will transition from his role on January 1, 2025. Maestri will continue to lead the Corporate Services teams, including information systems and technology, information security, and real estate and development, reporting to Apple CEO Tim Cook. As part of a planned succession, Kevan Parekh, Apple’s Vice President of Financial Planning and Analysis, will become Chief Financial Officer and join the executive team.
However, Apple could face a bigger challenge when it eventually needs to replace its CEO.
Luca Maestri will step down as the long-serving chief financial officer next year after more than a decade in the role but will stay on in a reduced role. This will be an inevitable reminder that Apple needs to do some succession planning for CEO Tim Cook.
That is not to suggest that Cook is necessarily stepping down soon. Despite having been in charge of Apple since 2011, he still looks to have an appetite for the role as he seeks to guide the company into the age of artificial intelligence… Still, shareholders might feel more comfortable if there were a clearly designated successor to face the company’s future challenges.
Cook’s record in growing Apple’s revenue and market capitalization can hardly be criticized, but at the same time he isn’t seen as a visionary as his predecessor Steve Jobs was.
If AI-equipped smartphones prove not to be a hit, there could be more pressure for Cook to line up the next leader of the company, especially one who might hold the key to launching a hit new product category…
That could put John Ternus, Apple’s 49 year-old senior vice president of hardware engineering, in a good position, assuming the successor comes from within. Cook is likely to remain in place for at least another three years, and if he does so then Ternus is the most probable long-term successor, Bloomberg reported in May, citing people close to the Apple CEO and people within the company.
MacDailyNews Take: We shall see, but it’s likely that Apple will do the same thing they did with Jony Ive – give him a transition title with nothing much to actually do in order to assuage Wall Street (and as they also just did with Maestri) when Cook finally decides to bow out — which he should have done long ago after serving 3-5 years following Steve Jobs’ untimely demise; a caretaker CEO hanging on well over a decade leads major to missing things like GenAI and having to execute vaporware operations in order to try to catch up. Until Apple again gets a visionary CEO, these issues will compound. it would also be nice to get a charismatic CEO who can handle live keynotes again.
As we wrote on March 22, 2024:
There are a lot of people inside and outside of Apple who think the company should have waited on the Vision Pro, but it’s fairly easy today to see why Tim Cook released this beta (alpha?) devkit: He likely knew last year, or had a strong inkling, that Project Titan was a goner and there wasn’t much excitement in Apple’s pipeline. He’d need something to point to as “innovation” while he continued on his seemingly unending quest to iterate and monetize products invented by Steve Jobs’ Apple (a very different place) while continuing Apple’s retail store buildout. He also needed something to energize developers and, who knows, they might come up with a killer visionOS app while Apple toils on the long road to real lightweight spatial computing glasses and beyond.
More importantly, Apple last year had already come to the sad realization that they’d missed the generative artificial intelligence revolution and would need a distraction while they feverishly scrambled to catch up (the fruits of which — alongside what sound like disappointing partnerships which hopefully, somehow, preserve user privacy — we’ll hopefully begin to see at WWDC this June).
You have to feel for Cook. After a decade plus of being able to iterate and monetize Jobs’ inspired products and services and continue adding retail stores around the world to spectacular effect, and being lauded for it, he now finds himself in a place that requires actual vision to be able to see which path to take. And he’s not the guy. Even the guy who put him in the position knew it.
Tim’s not a product person, per se. – Steve Jobs
See also:
• Contrary to popular belief, Steve Jobs knew about Apple Watch – February 13, 2023
• Work on Apple Vision Pro began under Steve Jobs – August 23, 2023
Beyond the fact that Cook can’t even execute a compelling live keynote address, his big send off, the “Apple Car,” [the idea of which was also germinated under Jobs] fizzled in ignominious failure.
See also:
• Scrapped Apple Car ‘a massive disappointment that will alter the course of the company’s history, perhaps for decades to come’ – Gurman – March 11, 2024
• Apple employees referred to doomed Apple Car project as ‘The Titanic Disaster’ – February 29, 2024
So, despite myriad misgivings and protestations inside Apple, Cook pulled the trigger early on the Vision Pro. He had to have something to point to that would buy him some time. Even Apple’s rubber-stamping board of lackeys would wake up and start asking questions otherwise.
While Cook is hemming and hawing when faced with shareholders (virtually, of course, never again in person for as long as Cook remains), Apple is currently in scramble mode trying to catch up to rivals — including the world’s most valuable company, Microsoft — in generative AI, a technology the company seems to have completely missed while focusing instead on the not-ready-for-primetime Apple Vision Pro, visionOS, its now-canceled decade-long multi-billion-dollar electric vehicle boondoggle, replacing leather in iPhone cases and Apple Watch bands with overpriced junk in a quest to “save the planet,” forcing employees to endure a constant barrage of time-wasting zero-productivity DEI sessions, and myriad other various and sundry “initiatives” which Cook deems of import. – MacDailyNews, February 28, 2024
When you lose your visionary CEO and replace him with a caretaker CEO, this is the type of aimless, late, bureaucratic dithering that ensues. – MacDailyNews, November 21, 2017
Until it gets another visionary leader (fingers crossed; Apple’s history has shown – cough, Sculley, Spindler, cough – that the next CEO could be far, far worse than the very competent caretaker Cook), Apple can afford to miss things like generative AI – which they clearly did – and then use its huge war chest to catch up – which they’re doing right now (fun times and 80-hour weeks inside Apple Park!) – and, hopefully, surpass rivals (or at least be as good). Apple will very likely unveil their catch-up work within months (this June at WWDC 2024) in iPhones (and iPads, Apple Watches, etc.) with built-in on-device generative AI and other new AI-driven features. – MacDailyNews, February 14, 2024
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