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.

★ Wednesday, 9 July 2025