Apple:

Apple today announced that Jennifer Newstead will become Apple’s general counsel on March 1, 2026, following a transition of duties from Kate Adams, who has served as Apple’s general counsel since 2017. She will join Apple as senior vice president in January, reporting to CEO Tim Cook and serving on Apple’s executive team.

In addition, Lisa Jackson, vice president for Environment, Policy, and Social Initiatives, will retire in late January 2026. The Government Affairs organization will transition to Adams, who will oversee the team until her retirement late next year, after which it will be led by Newstead. Newstead’s title will become senior vice president, General Counsel and Government Affairs, reflecting the combining of the two organizations. The Environment and Social Initiatives teams will report to Apple chief operating officer Sabih Khan.

What will tomorrow bring, I wonder?

Newstead has spent the past year working closely with Joel Kaplan, and fighting the FTC’s case against Meta — successfully, I should add. Before that, she was a Trump appointee at the U.S. State Department. Well positioned, then, to fight Apple’s U.S. antitrust lawsuit against a second-term Trump government that has successfully solicited Apple’s money.

John Voorhees, MacStories:

Although Apple doesn’t say so in its press release, it’s pretty clear that a few things are playing out among its executive ranks. First, a large number of them are approaching retirement age, and Apple is transitioning and changing roles internally to account for those who are retiring. Second, the company is dealing with departures like Alan Dye’s and what appears to be the less-than-voluntary retirement of John Giannandrea. Finally, the company is reducing the number of Tim Cook’s direct reports, which is undoubtedly to simplify the transition to a new CEO in the relatively near future.

A careful reader will notice Apple’s newsroom page currently has press releases for these departures and, from earlier this week, John Giannandrea’s, but there is nothing about Alan Dye’s. In fact, even in the statement quoted by Bloomberg, Dye is not mentioned. In fairness, Adams, Giannandrea, and Jackson all have bios on Apple’s leadership page. Dye’s was removed between 2017 and 2018.

Starting to think Mark Gurman might be wrong about that FT report.

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Mark Gurman, Bloomberg:

Meta Platforms Inc. has poached Apple Inc.’s most prominent design executive in a major coup that underscores a push by the social networking giant into AI-equipped consumer devices.

The company is hiring Alan Dye, who has served as the head of Apple’s user interface design team since 2015, according to people with knowledge of the matter. Apple is replacing Dye with longtime designer Stephen Lemay, according to the people, who asked not to be identified because the personnel changes haven’t been announced.

Big week for changes in Apple leadership.

I am sure more will trickle out about this, but one thing notable to me is that Lemay has been a software designer for over 25 years at Apple. Dye, on the other hand, came from marketing and print design. I do not want to put too much weight on that — someone can be a sufficiently talented multidisciplinary designer — but I am curious to see what Lemay might do in a more senior role.

Admittedly I also have some (perhaps morbid) curiosity about what Dye will do at Meta.

One more note from Gurman’s report:

Dye had taken on a more significant role at Apple after Ive left, helping define how the company’s latest operating systems, apps and devices look and feel. The executive informed Apple this week that he’d decided to leave, though top management had already been bracing for his departure, the people said. Dye will join Meta as chief design officer on Dec. 31.

Let me get this straight: Dye personally launches an overhaul of Apple’s entire visual interface language, then leaves. Is that a good sign for its reception, either internally or externally?

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Apple:

Apple today announced John Giannandrea, Apple’s senior vice president for Machine Learning and AI Strategy, is stepping down from his position and will serve as an advisor to the company before retiring in the spring of 2026. Apple also announced that renowned AI researcher Amar Subramanya has joined Apple as vice president of AI, reporting to Craig Federighi. Subramanya will be leading critical areas, including Apple Foundation Models, ML research, and AI Safety and Evaluation. The balance of Giannandrea’s organization will shift to Sabih Khan and Eddy Cue to align closer with similar organizations.

When Apple hired Giannandrea from Google in 2018, the New York Times called it a “major coup”, given that Siri was “less effective than its counterparts at Google and Amazon”. The world changed a lot in the past six-and-a-half years, though: Siri is now also worse than a bunch of A.I. products. Of course, Giannandrea’s role at Apple was not limited to Siri. He spent time on the Project Titan autonomous car, which was cancelled early last year, before moving to generative A.I. projects. The first results of that effort were shown at WWDC last year; the most impressive features have yet to ship.

I feel embarrassed and dumb for hoping Giannandrea would help shake the company out of its bizarre Siri stupor. Alas, he is now on the Graceful Executive Exit Express, where he gets to spend a few more months at Apple in a kind of transitional capacity — you know the drill. Maybe Subramanya will help move the needle. Maybe this ex-Googler will make it so. Maybe I, Charlie Brown, will get to kick that football.

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Apple issued a press release criticizing the E.U.’s Digital Markets Act in a curious mix of countries. It published it on its European sites — of course — and in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States, all English-speaking. It also issued the same press release in Brazil, China, Guinea-Bissau, Indonesia, and Thailand — and a handful of other places — but not in Argentina, India, Japan, Mexico, or Singapore. Why this mix? Why did Apple bother to translate it into Thai but not Japanese? It is a fine mystery. Read into it what you will.

Anyway, you will be amazed to know how Apple now views the DMA:

It’s been more than a year since the Digital Markets Act was implemented. Over that time, it’s become clear that the DMA is leading to a worse experience for Apple users in the EU. It’s exposing them to new risks, and disrupting the simple, seamless way their Apple products work together. And as new technologies come out, our European users’ Apple products will only fall further behind.

[…]

That’s why we’re urging regulators to take a closer look at how the law is affecting the EU citizens who use Apple products every day. We believe our users in Europe deserve the best experience on our technology, at the same standard we provide in the rest of the world — and that’s what we’ll keep fighting to deliver.

It thinks the DMA should disappear.

Its reasoning is not great; Michael Tsai read the company’s feature delays more closely and is not convinced. One of the delayed features is Live Translation, about which I wrote:

This is kind of a funny limitation because fully half the languages Live Translation works with — French, German, and Spanish — are the versions spoken in their respective E.U. countries and not, for example, Canadian French or Chilean Spanish. […]

Because of its launch languages, I think Apple expects this holdup will not last for long.

I did not account for a cynical option: Apple is launching with these languages as leverage.

The way I read Apple’s press release is as a fundamental disagreement between the role each party believes it should play, particularly when it comes to user privacy. Apple seems to believe it is its responsibility to implement technical controls to fulfill its definition of privacy and, if that impacts competition and compatibility, too bad. E.U. regulators seem to believe it has policy protections for user privacy, and that users should get to decide how their private data is shared.

Adam Engst, TidBits:

Apple’s claim of “the same standard we provide in the rest of the world” rings somewhat hollow, given that it often adjusts its technology and services to comply with local laws. The company has made significant concessions to operate in China, doesn’t offer FaceTime in the United Arab Emirates, and removes apps from the still-functional Russian App Store at the Russian government’s request. Apple likely pushed back in less public ways in those countries, but in the EU, this public statement appears aimed at rallying its users and influencing the regulatory conversation.

I know what Engst is saying here, and I agree with the sentiment, but this is a bad group of countries to be lumped in together with. That does not mean the DMA is equal to the kinds of policies that restrict services in these other countries. It remains noteworthy how strict Apple is in restricting DMA-mandated features only to countries where they are required, but you can just change your region to work around the UAE FaceTime block.

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Jane Mundy, writing at the imaginatively named Lawyers and Settlements in December:

A former Apple executive has filed a California labor complaint against Apple and Jay Blahnik, the company’s vice president of fitness technologies. Mandana Mofidi accuses Apple of retaliation after she reported sexual harassment and raised concerns about receiving less pay than her male colleagues.

The Superior Court of California for the County of Los Angeles wants nearly seventeen of the finest United States dollars for a copy of the complaint alone.

Tripp Mickle, New York Times:

But along the way, [Jay] Blahnik created a toxic work environment, said nine current and former employees who worked with or for Mr. Blahnik and spoke about personnel issues on the condition of anonymity. They said Mr. Blahnik, 57, who leads a roughly 100-person division as vice president for fitness technologies, could be verbally abusive, manipulative and inappropriate. His behavior contributed to decisions by more than 10 workers to seek extended mental health or medical leaves of absence since 2022, about 10 percent of the team, these people said.

The behaviours described in this article are deeply unprofessional, at best. It is difficult to square the testimony of a sizeable portion of Blahnik’s team with an internal investigation finding no wrongdoing, but that is what Apple’s spokesperson expects us to believe.

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Benedict Evans:

That takes us to xR, and to AI. These are fields where the tech is fundamental, and where there are real, important Apple kinds of questions, where Apple really should be able to do something different. And yet, with the Vision Pro Apple stumbled, and then with AI it’s fallen flat on its face. This is a concern.

The Vision Pro shipped as promised and works as advertised. But it’s also both too heavy and bulky and far too expensive to be a viable mass-market consumer product. Hugo Barra called it an over-engineered developer kit — you could also call it an experiment, or a preview or a concept. […]

The main problem, I think, with the reception of the Vision Pro is that it was passed through the same marketing lens as Apple uses to frame all its products. I have no idea if Apple considers the sales of this experiment acceptable, the tepid developer adoption predictable, or the skeptical press understandable. However, if you believe the math on display production and estimated sales figures, they more-or-less match.

Of course, as Evans points out, Apple does not ship experiments:

The new Siri that’s been delayed this week is the mirror image of this. […]

However, it clearly is a problem that the Apple execution machine broke badly enough for Apple to spend an hour at WWDC and a bunch of TV commercials talking about vapourware that it didn’t appear to understand was vapourware. The decision to launch the Vision Pro looks like a related failure. It’s a big problem that this is late, but it’s an equally big problem that Apple thought it was almost ready.

Unlike the Siri feature delay, I do not think the Vision Pro’s launch affects the company’s credibility at all. It can keep pushing that thing and trying to turn it into something more mass-market. This Siri stuff is going to make me look at WWDC in a whole different light this year.

Mark Gurman, Bloomberg:

Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook has lost confidence in the ability of AI head John Giannandrea to execute on product development, so he’s moving over another top executive to help: Vision Pro creator Mike Rockwell. In a new role, Rockwell will be in charge of the Siri virtual assistant, according to the people, who asked not to be identified because the moves haven’t been announced.

[…]

Rockwell is known as the brains behind the Vision Pro, which is considered a technical marvel but not a commercial hit. Getting the headset to market required a number of technical breakthroughs, some of which leveraged forms of artificial intelligence. He is now moving away from the Vision Pro at a time when that unit is struggling to plot a future for the product.

If you had no context for this decision, it looks like Rockwell is being moved off Apple’s hot new product and onto a piece of software that perennially disappoints. It looks like a demotion. That is how badly Siri needs a shakeup.

Giannandrea will remain at the company, even with Rockwell taking over Siri. An abrupt departure would signal publicly that the AI efforts have been tumultuous — something Apple is reluctant to acknowledge. Giannandrea’s other responsibilities include oversight of research, testing and technologies related to AI. The company also has a team reporting to Giannandrea investigating robotics.

I figured as much. Gurman does not clarify in this article how much of Apple Intelligence falls under Giannandrea’s rubric, and how much is part of the “Siri” stuff that is being transferred to Rockwell. It does not sound as though Giannandrea will have no further Apple Intelligence responsibilities — yet — but the high-profile public-facing stuff is now overseen by Rockwell and, ultimately, Craig Federighi.

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Patrick McGee, Financial Times, August 2022:

In interviews with 15 female Apple employees, both current and former, the Financial Times has found that Mohr’s frustrating experience with the People group has echoes across at least seven Apple departments spanning six US states.

The women shared allegations of Apple’s apathy in the face of misconduct claims. Eight of them say they were retaliated against, while seven found HR to be disappointing or counterproductive.

Ashley Belanger, Ars Technica, last week:

Apple has spent years “intentionally, knowingly, and deliberately paying women less than men for substantially similar work,” a proposed class action lawsuit filed in California on Thursday alleged.

[…]

The current class action has alleged that Apple continues to ignore complaints that the company culture fosters an unfair and hostile workplace for women. It’s hard to estimate how much Apple might owe in back pay and other damages should women suing win, but it could easily add up if all 12,000 class members were paid thousands less than male counterparts over the complaint’s approximately four-year span. Apple could also be on the hook for hundreds in civil penalties per class member per pay period between 2020 and 2024.

I pulled the 2022 Financial Times investigation into this because one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit filed last week also alleges sexual harassment by a colleague which was not adequately addressed.

Stephen Council, SFGate:

The lawyer said that asking women about pay expectations “locks” past pay discrimination in and that the requirements of a job should determine pay. Finberg isn’t new to the fight over tech pay; he represented employees suing Oracle and Google for gender-based pay discrimination, securing $25 million and $118 million settlements, respectively.

Last year, Apple paid $25 million to settle claims it discriminated in U.S. hiring in favour of people whose ability to remain in the U.S. depended on their employment status.

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