In order to sort Siri out, Apple’s CEO Tim Cook has parachuted in a crack team led by Vision Pro creator, Mike Rockwell, who takes the place of AI head, John Giannandrea in the task. Cook has apparently lost confidence in Giannandrea to execute on product development, a Bloomberg report explains. Vision Pro hardware engineer Paul Meade will be succeeding Rockwell as the head of Apple’s spatial computing efforts, reporting to software engineering chief, Craig Federighi.
The man in the know
Mark Gurman, who really does seem to live on Tim Cook’s lapel, given the speed with which he delivers breaking news about the company, also tells us that two of Rockwell’s top lieutenants have already been dropped in the team to prepare things for Rockwell’s arrival.
These include vice president of the company’s Technology Development Group (TDG), Kim Vorrath, who moved across last month, and another senior manager, Aimee Nugent
Giannandrea will remain at the company, handling oversight of research, testing and technologies related to AI and robotics.
“Rockwell will report to software chief Craig Federighi, removing Siri completely from Giannandrea’s command. Apple is poised to announce the changes to employees this week. The iPhone maker’s senior leaders — a group known as the Top 100 — just met at a secretive, annual offsite gathering to discuss the future of the company. Its AI efforts were a key talking point at the summit, Bloomberg News has reported,” Gurman wrote.
‘Utter genius’
Rockwell is one of the company’s most accomplished engineers.
His work is impressively showcased in the Vision Pro, which while an expensive first adopter of a product still reflects an attention to detail and technological achievement no one else has yet been able to match. Rockwell led development of the product since 2016 and oversaw engineering from hardware to software and services.
He has also been critical of Siri for years, with ideas on how to improve it.
“He’s an utter genius and if anyone can get this done, it’s him,” an Apple insider told Gurman of Rockwell back in 2023.
Apple clearly feels that Rockwell has the talent for innovation and capacity to earn respect within his team it’s going to take to make Siri do what it should already be doing. Apple has still said it expects to get context into Siri within a year, but the rearranging of all these chairs suggest the extent to which the company feels it must do more.
Who leaked?
If there’s a one more thing to this it is this: Daring Fireball notes that Bloomberg’s scoop can only mean at least two of Apple’s top 100 executives leaked the news, which is in itself quite unprecedented. The company had intended to let employees know the news later in the week. If I’m not mistaken, there will be questions raised about that leak.
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