Following a report last week alleging that Apple's rumored electric vehicle project was internally delayed after its lead Steve Zadesky left in January 2016 for personal reasons, The Wall Street Journal is reporting today that Apple's enlisted help of its retired hardware chief Bob Mansfield, who will now oversee development of Project Titan.
Apple haters had a field day learning SVP of Technologies was stripped of his executive title this past Sunday. Nevermind that Technologies was created specifically for Mansfield last August by combining Apple's wireless and semiconductor teams and that he actually wanted to be relieved of executive responsibilities.
The org change was confirmed in a SEC filing and Apple cryptically said Mansfield will remain with the company to work on special projects, reporting directly to Tim Cook. Now, some watchers were quick to jump ahead of themselves and interpret the move as a bad sign for Apple and its celebrated hardware guru, who was un-retired at Tim Cook's request just a year ago.
Some even went as far to speculate Mansfield had fallen out of favor with Cook, which couldn't be farther form truth. That's certainly not what I've been hearing, along with other pundits who insist Apple engineers are loving the chubby executive a lot.
Other sources in the know have stepped forward, too, underscoring you could hear the same sentiment echoed throughout the corridors of 1 Infinite Loop. Yes, Mansfield was crucial to development of Apple's biggest hits, including the iMac, iPhone and iPad, but don't fret - he's not really going anywhere. Jump past the fold for the full reveal...
Yesterday, a jarring change was discovered on Apple's executive leadership page: the company's SVP of Technologies Bob Mansfield had been completely removed. Apple later confirmed the news, saying that Bob would no longer be on Apple's executive team.
And despite the fact that Apple said that he would stay on with the company to work on 'special projects,' the news was worrisome, as Mansfield has been crucial to Mac and iOS device success. But a new report claims there's "nothing punitive" about the role change...
Bob Mansifeld, Apple's Senior Vice President of Technologies, has been removed from the company's Leadership web page without explanation.
This is newsworthy because rarely does it slip Apple to pull corporate description of a high-ranked executive without announcing a leadership change beforehand.
Hopefully, Apple wouldn’t just take his description page down without an announcement so this could be some sort of a slip up, though the chances of that are very slim.
Update: a Reuters reporter has an official statement from Apple...
Although Apple compensated its CEO Tim Cook for the calendar year 2012 with a $1.36 million base salary and $2.8 million in compensation related to incentive plans, he didn't made the top five highest-rewarded corporate executives list in Standard & Poor’s top 500 companies. Instead, per Bloomberg's report filed Monday, four members of the Apple leadership dominate that list.
To be clear, these numbers count both base salaries and stock options companies usually give to their top dogs as sort of a retainer. Specifically, Bob Mansfield, Peter Oppenheimer, Bruce Sewell and Jeffrey Williams all made the top five highest-paid execs list, according to fiscal 2012 compensation figures for top earners filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission...
Last month, news broke that Apple hired Adobe's former Chief Technology Officer Kevin Lynch as its new VP of technology, reporting directly to Bob Mansfield who heads the new Technologies unit combining Apple's wireless and semiconductor teams. iDB, along with many other news outlets, opined how out of character the hiring evidently was given Lynch's history of public criticism of Apple's stance on Flash. According to a new report, the ex-Adobe exec may now be a part of the engineering group that's been developing a rumored Apple smartwatch project...
Remember the name Kevin Lynch, because you're probably going to be hearing a lot more of it from now on. The former Adobe CTO, or Chief Technology Officer, will soon be taking an executive role at Apple.
Reports of the high-profile hiring started circling this afternoon, and the news has since been confirmed by both Apple and Adobe. Lynch will be joining Apple as VP of technology, reporting to Bob Mansfield...
Bob Mansfield, Apple's un-retired SVP of Technologies, is another high-ranked executive to cash in shares of AAPL stock after an "insanely insane" sell-off that saw a quarter of Apple's market cap wiped off. Like other executives, Mansfield likely figured the move makes financial sense ahead of a rumored "fiscal cliff".
According to a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing, Mansfield, a long-time Apple veteran, unloaded 35,000 shares. At $582.21 a share, the transaction earned him $20,377,507.50. He still holds 29,548 shares and will get another 150,000 shares in June 2013 and March 2016 provided he stays with Apple.
Though Mansfield wanted to retire, Apple's boss has managed to convince him to stick around for two more years. If Cook gave me a $2 million a month paycheck as a compensation for an advisement position, I'd also un-retire in a heartbeat....
When Apple CEO Tim Cook last week fired abrasive iOS chief Scott Forstall, he also appointed the company's un-retired hardware engineering boss Bob Mansfield as the leader of the new Technologies group, which combines all of Apple's wireless and semiconductor teams. And in an email to employees announcing the management changes, Cook hinted that Technologies "have some very ambitious plans". But what could these plans be, apart from designing new processors for iOS devices, which is what Mansfield and his team have been doing for years now?
You're not thinking big enough. How about a transition away from Intel processors across the Mac lineup? But why on Earth engage in such a risky brain transplant? Aren't the chip giant's processors good enough for Macs? If "people familiar with the company’s research" are correct, Apple is secretly (well, not anymore) been seeking ways to one day take the processors it designed in-house for the iOS product family and put them inside Macs...
The many layers of why Scott Forstall was ousted as Apple's iOS chief just keep peeling away. The latest wrinkle: Bob Mansfield, the company's former hardware engineering senior vice president, agreed to come out of retirement to become senior vice president of Technologies, a new group encompassing wireless and hardware tech, only after Apple CEO Tim Cook offered a boatload of cash and the promise he didn't have to talk to Forstall...
Joy of Tech does regular takes on the tech industry's blunders and Apple is often the subject of their daily web comic. This is their view of Monday's executive shake-up that saw CEO Tim Cook fire long-time iOS chief Scott Forstall and retail boss (though he never earned that title) John Browett. Go past the fold for the comic and an additional explanation...