Jeff Williams, 62, Is Retiring as Apple's COO

Tuesday, 8 July 2025

Apple Newsroom, this afternoon:

Apple today announced Jeff Williams will transition his role as chief operating officer later this month to Sabih Khan, Apple’s senior vice president of Operations as part of a long-planned succession. Williams will continue reporting to Apple CEO Tim Cook and overseeing Apple’s world class design team and Apple Watch alongside the company’s Heath initiatives. Apple’s design team will then transition to reporting directly to Cook after Williams retires late in the year.

Apple’s executive ranks have been so remarkably stable for so long that any change feels surprising. But Williams is 62 years old and has been at Apple for 27 years. Tim Cook is 64, and Khan is 58. The whole thing seems amicable and orderly, and thus completely in line with everything we know about Williams’s and Cook’s seemingly similar personalities. After a long and successful career, Apple’s COO is retiring and his longtime lieutenant is being promoted to replace him this month. Apple’s operations aren’t just world-class, they’re almost certainly world-best. Even their leadership transitions are operationally smooth. Khan was promoted in 2019 to the title of senior vice president of operations. Williams was promoted from that title (SVP of operations) to COO in 2015, four years after Cook took over as CEO from Steve Jobs.

But that’s the operations part.

What’s intriguing about the announcement is the design part — a functional area where, especially on the software side, Apple’s current stature is subject to much debate. While Williams is staying on until “late in the year” to continue his other responsibilities — Watch, Health, and serving as the senior executive Apple’s design teams report to — Khan isn’t taking over those roles when Williams leaves. And so by the end of the year, Apple’s design teams will go from reporting to Williams to reporting directly to Tim Cook.

I’ve long found it curious, if not downright dubious, that Apple’s design leaders have reported to Williams ever since it was announced in 2019 (the very same day that Khan was promoted to SVP of operations) that Jony Ive would be stepping down as chief design officer and leaving Apple to found the (as-yet-unnamed) design firm LoveFrom. Williams had no background in design at all. Apple’s design teams reporting to an operations executive makes no more sense than it would for Apple’s operations teams to report to, say, Alan Dye. Well, maybe it made a little more sense than that — having design report to Williams sort of felt like a way to give Williams experience across the breadth of the company in the case that he ever needed to step in to replace Cook as CEO, either temporarily or permanently, as Cook was asked to for Jobs.

But when that was announced in 2019, I expected it to be temporary, while Apple took its time to properly identify a new senior design leader. Someone with, you know, design leadership experience, and strong opinions about and deep knowledge of the craft of design. That was six years ago, and Apple has seemingly made not one move toward naming a new chief design officer or (the more likely title) SVP of design. It seems like time for that now.

I get the impression — from multiple sources — that overseeing, not leading, is in fact exactly the right word for Williams’s role regarding design since 2019. Williams oversaw design the same way Tim Cook, ultimately, oversees everything the company does. It was in no way a token role. Williams was there. He asked insightful questions about product designs and experiences. But he didn’t push back or offer opinions. There’s much to like about Liquid Glass, for example, but there’s also a lot of shitty UI functionality and just plain bad design that makes you wonder how numerous aspects even escaped the drawing board, let alone made their way into the WWDC keynote and various OS 26 betas. Looking back at the last six years of Apple design — hardware, software, packaging, architecture — I detect not one fingerprint of style or taste that belongs to Jeff Williams. Given that Williams is not a designer, that’s not a surprise. But it’s a problem for the company if its products don’t ultimately have a distinctive voice.

I’m of the mind that, in hindsight, it was a mistake for Jony Ive to bring HI (software human interface design) under the same roof as ID (hardware industrial design). That arrangement made sense for Ive’s unique role in the company, and the unique period in the wake of Steve Jobs’s too-young demise. But it might have ultimately made Ive more difficult to replace than Steve Jobs. Williams’s combination of authority, mild-mannered-ness, and equanimity might have made him uniquely suited to either finding another Ive-like design leader whom all sides could have agreed to (even if begrudgingly), or, to the task of unwinding the intermingling of HI and ID that occurred during the Jony-as-CDO era. But neither of those things happened.

Post-Williams, Apple’s operations will clearly remain under excellent, experienced leadership under Sabih Khan. But the company will be left with its design teams reporting directly to Cook — who is three years older than Williams. Six years after Jony Ive’s departure, today’s announcements leave it less clear than ever whose taste, ultimately, is steering the work of the company into the future. Perhaps, I hope, Williams is staying until the end of the year to help answer that question.