In January 2021, Apple reshuffled its hardware engineering team by Dan Riccio shifting from Senior Vice President of Hardware Engineering to a “new role focusing on a new project.” John Ternus then took the reins of the hardware engineering team and joined Apple’s executive team.
Bloomberg now reports that Riccio “has told colleagues he’s nearing retirement after more than 25 years at the company.”
When Apple announced the lineup changes in January 2021, it didn’t specify what “new project” Riccio was going to oversee. Reports at the time, however, suggested that the mysterious project was Apple’s first AR/VR headset – which we now know as Vision Pro. Now that the first Vision Pro is out into the world, Riccio is ready to call it quits.
In today’s edition of his Power On newsletter, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman says that Riccio is known inside Apple as a “hard-driving and controversial boss.” He joined the company in 1998 and led teams across multiple iPhone, iPad, and Mac launches, in addition to Vision Pro and the Apple Silicon transition.
As Gurman explains, however, there were some speed bumps along the way:
Riccio is known as a hard-driving and controversial boss within Apple, and things haven’t always gone smoothly. There was the company’s shaky entry into smart speakers, a failed TV set project and, of course, the car. There also was a period in which Apple attempted to wind down the Mac in favor of the iPad. That clearly didn’t work, but the 2020 shift from Intel Corp. to Apple’s homegrown chips — an effort Riccio helped lead — turned things around. After all that, getting the Vision Pro out was a capstone moment.
There’s no timeline on when Riccio will officially announce his retirement, but Bloomberg makes it clear it’s coming soon. One question that remains is who takes over Riccio’s role of overseeing the Vision Pro group, which is led on a day-to-day basis by VP Mike Rockwell.
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