What the heck is going on at Apple?

Dye may have also been involved in that, given how unpopular he was internally at Apple. But more likely just personal / Meta offered him a billion dollars. Maestri leaving was also probably totally uninvolved.

Srouji is the weirdest case, and I'm hesitant to believe its even true just given its a rumor at this point. Its possible he was angry about being passed over for CEO, but realistically, it was always going to be Ternus, Williams, or Federighi. If Ternus is the next CEO, its likely we'll see Apple combine the Hardware Technologies and Hardware Engineering divisions, then have Srouji lead both of them. I really do not see him leaving the company.

The other less probable theory is that they actually picked Fadell, and this deeply pissed off many people in Apple's senior leadership. So, what we're seeing is more chaos than it first seems.

Generally, as long as Srouji doesn't leave, these changes feel positive for Apple, and especially if there's a CEO change in early 2026: This is what "the fifth generation of Apple Inc" looks like. I don't understand the mindset of people who complain about Apple's products and behavior over the past decade, then don't receive this news as directionally positive.

What they point out is that a lot of Apple's senior leadership are of a similar age and are simply approaching retirement now. But they are also losing younger rising stars they desperately need to fill the ensuing void. At the moment, they are simply losing talent left and right, and that is unsustainable if they want to maintain their competitive edge and avoid completely turning into Microsoft.

The more likely explanation is that a certain amount of internal rot has set in. They haven't really launched a successful major new product category in years, and a lot of their initiatives have either stalled or failed. Something is clearly not right, and top tier talent doesn't will only tolerate that sort of thing for so long before moving on.

I agree this is true, but Apple’s always done their best work when they’re the second mover. Smartphones, iPods, earbuds, good desktop PCs were all after they watched what was good and then made it better (if you like what they did, anyway).

The next hardware category is probably AR glasses if someone can make them good and cheap, nobody has so Apple won’t do anything but wait. I’m sure they have an optics lab working on something, but probably not full throttle (and the Vision Pro is an attempt to make the OS).

People say Apple does its best work as a “second mover,” but that misses the actual pattern: Apple builds great products when leadership is solving their own problems.

The Mac, iPod, iPhone, and iPad weren’t just refinements of existing products. They were devices Steve Jobs personally wanted to use and couldn’t find elsewhere. The man saw the GUI at Xerox and saw how anyone could use a computer without remembering arcane commands. So he drove the development of the Mac. He was using a shitty mobile phone, saw the opportunity and had the iPhone developed. Same with the early Apple Watch (first post-Jobs new product line), which reflected Jony Ive’s fashion ambitions; once he left, it evolved into what current leadership actually uses: a high-end fitness tracker.

The stagnation we're seeing now isn’t about Apple losing its “second-mover magic.” It’s that leadership doesn’t feel an unmet need that demands a new device. None of Vision Pro, Siri, Apple Intelligence or even macOS itself anymore appear to be products the execs themselves rely on deeply, and it shows. Apple excels when it scratches its own itch and right now, it doesn’t seem to have one.