No one stays at the top forever, even if the legend of Silicon Valley is engraved with Apple’s apple as an emblem of perpetual innovation.
The departure of Jeff Williams, chief operating officer and one of the last guardians of Steve Jobs’ legacy, shakes the company at a time of strategic weakness and existential doubts about its future in the age of artificial intelligence.
The question is inevitable: who will take the baton when Tim Cook decides to leave the stage?
The Age of Disruption: When Apple Reinvented the Present
By: Gabriel E. Levy B.
In the mid-1970s and 1980s, Apple transformed the meaning of personal computing. Jobs and Wozniak opened the door to the Macintosh, the first personal computer designed for the general public, with the ambition of turning technology into an everyday and beautiful object.
Decades later, the iPod, iPhone and iPad redefined the rules of digital consumption and precipitated the smartphone revolution. Authors such as Walter Isaacson, biographer of Steve Jobs, narrated how the company imposed a new canon of design and usability, seducing millions and setting the pace of the global industry (Isaacson, 2011).
Yuval Noah Harari, in his analysis of the impact of technology, placed Apple as a decisive force in the shaping of contemporary culture (Harari, 2016).
However, the wake of disruption is not infinite.
With Jobs’ death in 2011, the Cupertino firm consolidated its financial leadership, but the promise of “thinking differently” began to crack.
Apple went from provoking amazement to being seen as a replication machine, in which true advances became incremental, not revolutionary.
Succession of the Titans: Between Jobs’ Shadow and Cook’s Challenge
Steve Jobs left a void that was impossible to fill, but Tim Cook knew how to stabilize the ship.
Under his direction, Apple not only multiplied its stock market value, but also honed its logistical muscle and optimized the profitability of each product.
Cook, methodical and serene, built a leadership based on efficiency, not charismatic genius.
However, over time, the question about the replacement became recurrent. Jeff Williams emerged as the natural heir: pragmatic engineer, orchestrator of the global supply chain, and mastermind behind milestones like the Apple Watch and the integration of Gorilla Glass into the original iPhone.
But now Williams is retiring, leaving behind 27 years of experience and the feeling that the founding generation is aging without a clear replacement. The phenomenon is not exclusive to Apple.
As Chris Zook points out in his book The Founder’s Mentality, many successful organizations face an identity crisis when the original leaders retire and the structure must be reinvented to avoid bureaucratization and stagnation (Zook, 2016).
From glory to uncertainty: the changing winds in Cupertino
The timing could not be less opportune.
While the competition, especially Chinese tech companies and giants such as Meta and Google, advances in artificial intelligence, Apple seems to be lagging behind.
The company is facing an exodus of talent to companies like Meta, which has signed key figures in AI, including Ruoming Pang, former leader of Apple Intelligence’s modeling team.
Mark Gurman, an analyst at Bloomberg, describes an internal crisis of morale, in which the option of outsourcing the development of models to companies such as OpenAI or Anthropic calls into question the work of years of the company’s own team.
In addition to Williams’ departure, Sabih Khan has arrived as the new chief operating officer.
Khan, Apple’s logistics architect for the past decade, represents operational continuity, but not the creative leap.
Their role will be to keep the engine running, not necessarily reinvent the route.
Meanwhile, the figures of John Ternus, Craig Federighi and Eddy Cue circulate on the media radar as potential candidates to succeed Cook. Federighi, with his silver hair and aura of a software star, has already taken charge of the AI strategy after Pang’s escape, although the bet has not yet paid off.
The Innovation Dilemma: When Giants Lose Step
Apple has always sold itself as the brand that changed the world. However, in the last five years, the pace of innovation slowed and Eastern competition began to challenge its supremacy. Chinese brands such as Huawei, Xiaomi and Oppo launched devices with disruptive technologies, from periscope cameras to advances in fast charging and batteries.
The iPhone, once a symbol of the avant-garde, began to be perceived as a conservative option, wrapped in the luxury of its ecosystem, but less and less surprising.
At the same time, the battle of artificial intelligence became the new battlefield. Google launched Gemini, Meta bet big on Llama, and OpenAI opened the race for large language models.
Apple, meanwhile, introduced Apple Intelligence, but its advances pale in comparison to the deployment of the competition. Authors such as Shoshana Zuboff have warned that the current digital revolution no longer revolves around hardware, but rather the ability to process and analyze data in real time to personalize services and anticipate desires (Zuboff, 2019).
In that field, Apple is still looking for its place.
As the company tries to adapt Siri to a new generation of conversational intelligence, the use of external models exposes a weakness: the lack of independence in the development of its AI.
Internal morale suffers and, according to Bloomberg reports, engineers perceive that their work could become obsolete in a change of strategy.
Transition cases: learning from the recent past
The succession process is not a trivial matter in Big Tech.
The case of Microsoft, which faced its own crisis when Bill Gates handed over the helm to Steve Ballmer and then to Satya Nadella, illustrates the risks and opportunities of these moments.
Nadella, for example, was able to reinvent Microsoft by embracing the cloud and artificial intelligence, relaunching its global relevance.
In contrast, Intel suffered a long decline after the departure of its founders, unable to adapt to technological change and losing ground to rivals such as AMD and TSMC.
Apple also offers its own lessons.
After Jony Ive’s departure in 2019, the design area fragmented and lost the symbolic weight of Jobs’ times. Williams, who took the reins of that team, managed to avoid a major crisis, but did not recover the innovative spark of yesteryear.
Now, his departure coincides with a market that demands fast and bold responses from Apple in an environment where artificial intelligence redefines every interaction.
For its part, succession management in companies such as Amazon, with the departure of Jeff Bezos and the rise of Andy Jassy, shows that the challenge lies not only in maintaining growth, but also in avoiding the loss of identity and strategic dispersion.
Continuity is not always a guarantee of success when the environment changes at a dizzying pace.
In conclusion, Apple is facing one of the most delicate moments in its recent history. The generational change and the lag in artificial intelligence challenge its identity as a symbol of innovation. Without Williams and with Cook’s succession still unresolved, the company must decide whether to bet on continuity or dare to reinvent itself, knowing that the technological world waits for no one.
References
Isaacson, W. (2011). *Steve Jobs*. Simon & Schuster.
Harari, Y. N. (2016). *Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow*. Debate.
Zook, C. (2016). The Founder’s Mentality*. Harvard Business Review Press.
Zuboff, S. (2019). The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. PublicAffairs.
Bloomberg, Mark Gurman. “Apple Faces Morale Crisis Amid AI Talent Exodus.” Bloomberg, 2025.
