Apple’s chief operating officer Jeff Williams is in Taiwan as a guest of honor for Foxconn’s 50th anniversary celebrations. He’s reportedly joined by his deputy, Sabih Khan.
The rare visit is likely a compromise, enabling the occasion to be marked while CEO Tim Cook continues his policy of avoiding visits to the island …
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Apple’s chief operating officer Jeff Williams joined Fox Business for an interview this morning in which he expresses optimism about the US economy going forward. This comes after Tim Cook reportedly told Donald Trump that he expects a “v-shaped recovery” following the COVID-19 pandemic.
Apple Watch Series 4 is gaining the promised new ECG app later today, and CBS This Morning has aired a new segment with Apple’s Jeff Williams and Dr. Sumbul Desai to discuss the new electrocardiogram feature.
Apple’s chief operating officer Jeff Williams attended the 30th anniversary celebrations of A-series chipmaker Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, and took the opportunity to say a few words about the importance of AI in general – and the phone as an AI tool in particular.
I think we’re at an inflection point, with on-device computing, coupled with the potential of AI, to really change the world.
In the days following Apple’s record Q1 earnings announcements, Apple CEO Tim Cook and other top Apple executives held a Town Hall meeting at the Infinite Loop headquarters in Cupertino to reveal new announcements and take attendee questions.
Multiple sources in attendance at the event said that Cook as well as newly appointed Chief Operating Officer Jeff Williams each spoke and made announcements and teases related to new employee benefits, future iPad growth, Apple Watch sales, future retail stores in China, Apple Campus 2, and the future product pipeline.
Cook also fielded questions from the audience, attempting to reduce concerns related to the company’s iPhone dependence, discussing porting more Apple services to Android, growth in India, and releasing cheaper iPhones to appease growing markets.
In a radio interview on the syndicated show Conversations on Health Care, Apple COO Jeff Williams said that the reason Apple has come under attack for the use of child labor in its supply chain is that the company actively goes out looking for it. Other companies, he said, simply keep their heads down.
No company wants to talk about child labor. They don’t want to be associated with that. We shine a light on it. We go out and search for cases where an underage worker is found in a factory somewhere and then we take drastic actions with the supplier and the labor groups to try and make a change.
Then we report it publicly every year. We take a lot of heat for that. But we think the only way to make change is to go hit it head-on and talk about it.
Apple has come under fire over the years when underage workers were found in the company’s supply chain, and Williams has spoken before about Apple’s unusual stance on these issues …
Update: Mark Gurman breaks down what it all means here
Apple today announced a few leadership changes including a new COO and changes to App Store leadership. Jeff Williams, previously Senior Vice President Operations, is officially being promoted to Chief Operating Officer which is CEO Tim Cook’s old title. Williams, notably, has been heavily involved in the Apple Watch team as well as the open source ResearchKit initiative.
Phil Schiller, Apple’s Worldwide Marketing SVP, will add to his responsibilities the task of overseeing all the App Store leadership. The App Store change notably follows discontent from developers that the iPhone App Store has seen more focus than the Mac App Store, which key developers have left in recent months. The move officially acknowledges Schiller’s role as the face of the App Store going forward.
Re/code regularly gets Apple executives to appear at its annual conferences and this year is no exception. The site announced that Apple’s Senior Vice President of Operations Jeff Williams will speak at the Code Conference 2015, which runs May 26 to May 28th. Re/code’s speaker appearances typically take the form of an interview, so you can expect the executive to give some insight on Apple’s latest announcements (Apple Watch) although naturally major feature announcements will not be discussed. The WWDC keynote will serve as Apple’s platform to feature its newest advancements in iOS and OS X, which is held on June 8th.
As Apple continues to build up hype for the upcoming Watch launch on April 24th, the company has given ABC News an exclusive look at the health and fitness lab used for developing the activity features for the new wearable. Jeff Williams, who introduced ResearchKit on stage earlier this month, is featured in the video interview discussing the Apple Watch’s potential impact on health, while Jay Blahnik, formerly of Nike, leads a tour inside Apple’s fitness test facility.
Apple SVP Jeff Williams announcing ResearchKit
Following the introduction of ResearchKit at this month’s Apple event, Apple executives Jeff Williams and Bud Tribble held a question and answer session with Apple employees regarding the new initiative, according to a source who provided a transcript of the conversation. Williams, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Operations, is the top executive in charge of Apple’s health engineering initiatives, including the Apple Watch, HealthKit, ResearchKit, and fitness software. Tribble is a Software Engineering Vice President with a medical background as a doctor, and he organized many of the partnerships for both HealthKit and ResearchKit…
Following a report late last month that creditors of bankrupt sapphire supplier GT Advanced Technologies won a court order to get a look at sensitive Apple documents, now GT’s creditors are requesting a deposition of Apple executive Jeff Williams. The Wall Street Journal reports:
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Following Apple employees’ meeting with the FDA to discuss “mobile medical applications” earlier this year, AppleToolbox has published a response from the FDA to a Freedom of Information Act Request asking for more information about what was discussed.
A response to the request took three months to complete, and arrived just after Apple introduced its new HealthKit platform and Health app for iOS 8 last week. While much the FDA’s answer sounds like Apple was discussing HealthKit, the response also gives some interesting clues that Apple is working on health products that go beyond the sensors currently in the iPhone and iPad:
With the potential for more sensors on mobile devices, Apple believes there is the opportunity to do more with devices, and that there may be a moral obligation to do more… Sensors already exist on medical devices. For instance, Apple’s devices have cameras and accelerometers. There is still an opportunity to innovate, but Apple wants to make sure they are on the side of the FDA.
So we can assume Apple was likely meeting with the FDA for HealthKit, which takes advantage of the iPhone’s sensors and data collected by third-party apps through already available accessories, but it was also discussing implications of possibly tapping into additional sensors and doing more in the way of measuring health data. It won’t be any surprise to those that have followed our reports on iWatch as far back as last year, and we’ve continued following as Apple builds a team of medical, fitness, and sensor experts to work on the project.
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(Photo via Auburn University)
Following Apple CEO Tim Cook being honored with Auburn University’s College of Human Sciences Lifetime Achievement award last December, the university in Alabama from which Tim Cook graduated has shared a video profiling the Apple CEO and his impact at Auburn. While the video was first posted in March and surfaced today, it features commentary and interviews from other notable Apple figures including Jeff Williams, Senior VP of Operations, and Bob Iger, Disney CEO and Apple board member.
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Alongside the release of Apple’s supplier responsibility report today highlighting working conditions within its supply chain, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Operations Jeff Williams has also sent out a letter to employees. In the past, CEO Tim Cook has been known to send out an email to employees following the supplier report. In today’s letter, Williams went over some of the key points from the supplier responsibility report and noted, “to drive accountability, we are now publishing a quarterly list of the names, countries, and participation status of the smelters and refiners in our supply chain.” Williams also mentioned new education programs, the launch of the Apple Supplier Environment, Health, and Safety Academy, and more.
The full letter from Williams only accessible to employees is below:
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Rita Lane, Apple’s vice president of operations for the iPad, Mac desktops, and Mac accessories, has retired from the company, according to her public LinkedIn profile. As vice president of operations, Lane was in charge of the supply chain and manufacturing for iPads, computers like the iMac, and Apple’s Mac accessories.
Due to her position, Lane was likely instrumental in the iPad’s rapid growth as a product and emergence in society over the past few years, making the departure a significant loss for Apple. However, the company likely has other experienced operations managers who could fill Lane’s role. Her exact successor is unknown…
The December supply of Mac Pros?
The new Mac Pro is an awesome machine for those with several thousand dollars to spend on a computer and a need for all the power that comes with that thermal core, but managing to get one is going to be difficult for the next few months even if you have the credit card ready. Yesterday, Apple announced that the Mac Pro would go on sale today, December 19th. The store went live last night with the Mac Pro shipping the very last non-holi-day of 2013, December 30th.
As we noted earlier today, Apple’s customers in its home state of California awoke to Mac Pros being quoted to ship in February. But it gets worse…
In light of Apple’s launch of two new iPhones, Bloomberg has taken an extensive look at the behind-the-scenes process of Apple’s shipments of new products from the Asia-based supply chain to sales channels such as Apple Stores.
The process starts in China, where pallets of iPhones are moved from factories in unmarked containers accompanied by a security detail. The containers are then loaded onto trucks and shipped via pre-bought airfreight space, including on old Russian military transports. The journey ends in stores where the world’s biggest technology company makes constant adjustments based on demand, said people who have worked on Apple’s logistics and asked not to be identified because the process is secret.
The process, designed by Apple CEO Tim Cook, is led by Senior VP of Operations Jeff Williams and Michael Seifert, another operations executive at Apple.
Some interesting tidbits include the process of security guards consistently following the new devices from shipment to delivery. When a product actually launches, the supply management process is said to continue as Apple studies the progress of the launch.
Apple executive Bob Mansfield’s unexplained departure from Apple’s leadership team is due to the long-time engineer’s desire to focus on chipset design plus future products and less on executive duties, according to sources with knowledge of the change.
As part of Mansfield’s leave from the executive team and role change to “special projects” under Apple CEO Tim Cook, Mansfield’s former duties as Senior Vice President of Technologies have been split between two Senior VPs: Hardware chief Dan Riccio and Operations head Jeff Williams, according to these sources.
Apple CEO Tim Cook spent Friday and Saturday at Duke University during one of the school’s “Real Conversations with Real Leaders” sessions. Cook gave business advice from his perspective as one of the most powerful executives in the world to the crowd at his alma mater.
photo by <a href="http://instagram.com/p/Ynos07nn0d/" target="_blank">csinar</a>
Tim Cook graduated from the Fuqua School of Business in 1988. Other Duke alumni at Apple include Senior Vice President of Internet Services Eddy Cue and Senior Vice President of Operations Jeff Williams…
