Apple has quietly reshaped the leadership team behind its devices, giving hardware chief Johny Srouji more authority and moving several long-running responsibilities under a tighter chain of command. The timing is no accident: the company is also preparing for John Ternus to take over as CEO on 1 September, so this looks less like routine housekeeping and more like a deliberate reset of who owns what inside Apple.
The biggest shift in Apple device leadership is in product design. Kate Bergeron, a veteran vice president, has handed day-to-day control to two deputies: Shelly Goldberg, who already runs Mac design, and Dave Pakula, who handles Apple Watch, iPad, and AirPods. Richard Dinh stays in charge of iPhone design, which is a polite way of saying Apple still treats the iPhone as its own kingdom.
Apple’s chip and device teams are being pulled closer together
Bergeron is also taking on responsibility for device reliability while keeping oversight of materials selection. In parallel, Tom Marieb is moving into a broader hardware engineering role and will report directly to Srouji, while Bergeron now reports to Marieb. That extra layer sounds bureaucratic, but it also ties design, reliability, and materials more tightly to the same hardware leadership as Apple pushes deeper into in-house silicon and custom components.
Several other executives are shifting under Marieb too: Eugene Kim on Apple Watch, Deniz Teoman on electrical engineering, and Paul Meade on Vision Pro and related systems. Srouji is also bringing Matt Costello, now focused on ecosystem platforms and partner programs, and Kevin Lynch, who leads Apple’s robotics work, directly under his own wing.
New roles for Apple’s chip and sensor specialists
The silicon side of the house is expanding as well. Sribalan Santhanam, who leads Apple’s custom processors, will now oversee chip developers in Israel plus teams working on packaging, analog-to-digital tech, signal processing, and power management. Zongjian Chen, who has been developing modem-related components, is taking on sensor and prototyping teams, display developers, and the group working on Apple’s noninvasive blood glucose sensor.
- Johny Srouji gains broader hardware and technology authority
- Kate Bergeron shifts from product design leadership to reliability oversight
- Tom Marieb becomes the main hardware engineering boss under Srouji
- Sribalan Santhanam adds chip, packaging, and power teams to his remit
- Zongjian Chen takes sensors, prototypes, displays, and the glucose sensor project
There is a clear pattern here: Apple is reducing the distance between the teams that design devices and the teams that build the guts inside them. That matters because the company now leans more heavily than ever on custom silicon, while rivals are still trying to stitch together hardware, software, and AI ambitions without tripping over their own org charts.
What Apple’s leadership reshuffle could mean for future products
Apple has long liked to keep its most sensitive engineering work behind multiple layers of management, but this reshuffle suggests a more integrated setup is winning out. The obvious upside is speed: fewer handoffs, less turf protection, and a better chance that chip, sensor, and device teams are solving the same problem instead of three slightly different ones. The open question is whether that tighter structure will make Apple more flexible, or just make it easier to spot who to blame when the next ambitious device misses the mark.