Apple is rearranging who gets to steer its hardware work, and the timing is hard to miss: John Ternus is set to become CEO on September 1, while longtime chip chief Johny Srouji has already taken on a broader role as Chief Hardware Officer. The latest shuffle pushes product design closer to Apple’s silicon teams, a sensible move if the company wants new devices to feel less like parallel projects and more like one machine built from the same blueprint.
According to Bloomberg, oversight of Apple’s product design is moving from Kate Bergeron to two of her longtime deputies, Shelly Goldberg and Dave Pakula. Goldberg already handled Mac product design, while Pakula led work on Apple Watch, iPad, and AirPods; now both will oversee all of Apple’s products. That is a lot of responsibility to hand to two internal veterans, but it also suggests Apple prefers continuity over a dramatic clean break.
What changes in Apple’s hardware chain of command
Apple’s product design group is not the same as industrial design. Industrial design sets the look and feel; product design turns those ideas into shipping hardware. Bergeron is not disappearing from the picture, though: she is taking over product reliability across Apple’s devices and will keep leading the team that decides which materials go into products. In other words, she moves from shaping the build to policing whether the build survives real life.
- Shelly Goldberg and Dave Pakula now oversee product design across Apple’s entire lineup
- Kate Bergeron shifts to product reliability and materials oversight
- The move is meant to bring chip and product development closer together
Two former Ternus deputies now report to Srouji
The reorganization goes further down the org chart. Matt Costello, who has led Apple’s home and audio products, and Kevin Lynch, who runs a special projects group focused on robotics devices, will now report directly to Srouji. That matters because Apple has spent years trying to make its custom chips do more of the heavy lifting across more product categories, a pattern that has helped it tighten hardware-software integration across its lineup.
Apple’s latest move looks less like a flashy reset than an efficiency play, which is very Apple. If the company can shorten the distance between silicon, product design, reliability, and materials decisions, future devices should get out the door faster and with fewer turf wars. Whether that produces better gadgets or just a tidier org chart is the open question, but the internal logic is obvious: the next CEO will inherit a hardware machine built to move in fewer, larger pieces.