Linked List: July 9, 2025

Wednesday, 9 July 2025

Mark Gurman Got a Slew of Interesting Quotes Regarding Jeff Williams’s Retirement 

Mark Gurman got some interesting quotes from interesting former Apple employees for his report at Bloomberg on Jeff Williams’s retirement:

“Jeff’s importance and contributions to Apple have been enormous, although perhaps not always obvious to the general public,” said Tony Blevins, a former Apple operations vice president who reported to Williams until the end of 2022. “As a shareholder, I am saddened. Time takes its toll, and it’s almost as if the band is dissolving. Jeff will be sorely missed.”

Blevins is a fascinating character. A hard-charging negotiator nicknamed “the Blevinator”, Blevins was somewhat ignominiously run out of Apple in 2022 after he appeared in a TikTok video that went viral making a joke that, out of context, seemed very crude, but was in fact just a quote from the mildly crude 1981 Dudley Moore hit movie Arthur.

“Clearly he wasn’t destined to be the Tim Cook replacement,” Bob Mansfield, the company’s former chief of hardware engineering under both Cook and co-founder Steve Jobs, said of Williams. “He’s about the same age as Tim, so that wouldn’t make much sense. The operations team at Apple is really going to miss Jeff.”

Mansfield is the only ex-Apple person I’ve seen quoted who addressed the succession issue. (And of course, no current Apple people are quoted anywhere, other than in Apple’s PR announcement of Williams’s retirement.)

Myoung Cha, who reported to Williams in the health group until 2021, said the outgoing COO’s “personal passion for health” helped shape the Apple Watch and that his presence on the team will be “hugely missed.”

“Sabih is very much cut from the Tim Cook cloth,” said Matthew Moore, a former Apple operations engineer. “Jeff was a little more product minded; Sabih is just a really brilliant operator and methodical in the same way that Tim would operate.” Moore added that Khan has already been running Apple’s operations group and that the team “won’t miss a beat.” “The concerns will be in the other areas” that Williams currently oversees, he said.

I wrote about Williams’s “overseeing” of design yesterday. Design — software at least — has already become a concern in the six years since Jony Ive left Apple, which is when design teams started reporting to Williams. And, frankly, it’s been a concern for many of us ever since Scott Forstall was fired and Ive put all design — HI and ID — under the same roof.

Apple did announce yesterday that after Williams fully retires at the end of this year, design leaders will start reporting to Tim Cook directly. Left unsaid in Apple’s announcement is who will take over Williams’s roles overseeing Apple Watch and Health. I presume Watch will simply fall under John Ternus (SVP hardware) and that Sumbul Desai, who already has the title VP of health and frequently (always?) appears during the Health segments of Apple keynotes, will report directly to Cook.

Apple TV+ Renews ‘Slow Horses’ for a Seventh Season 

Apple TV+:

Today, Apple TV+ announced a new, six-episode seventh season for the widely hailed, darkly comedic spy drama Slow Horses. The Emmy and BAFTA Award-winning series stars Academy Award winner Sir Gary Oldman, who has been honored with Golden Globe, Emmy and BAFTA Award nominations for his outstanding performance as the beloved, irascible Jackson Lamb. The complete first four seasons of Slow Horses are now streaming on Apple TV+, with the premiere of season five slated for September 24, 2025. Season six was announced last year.

It’s always good news when a show you love is renewed for another season. It’s almost too good to be true that Slow Horses has been renewed so far into the future already. It’s so good.

Maybe I’m just lucky that the Apple TV shows I like best have proven broadly popular, but it feels like quite the difference from other streaming services.

OpenAI Officially Acquires ‘io Products Inc.’ 

OpenAI’s page for io, minus the “Sam and Jony” short film that introduced the partnership, is back up, with a brief announcement that the deal has officially closed:

We’re thrilled to share that the io Products, Inc. team has officially merged with OpenAI. Jony Ive and LoveFrom remain independent and have assumed deep design and creative responsibilities across OpenAI.

Referring to the company as “io Products Inc.” rather than just “io” is seemingly their stopgap workaround for the trademark injunction they faced from rival startup iyO two weeks ago, which led them to temporarily take down this web page and the video. The video remains unavailable, presumably because of the ongoing trademark dispute.