Apple's chief chip architect for the last decade has reportedly talked to CEO Tim Cook about leaving (Updated)

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Johny Srouji isn't interested in retiring, though.

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(Image credit: Apple)
Recent updates

Update 12/8/25: On Monday, Srouji sent a memo to staff saying he doesn't "plan on leaving anytime soon," Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reports. The memo was sent in response to Bloomberg's original reporting over the weekend, where the outlet suggested Soruji had recently discussed leaving Apple.

Johny Srouji, the man behind development of Apple's processors in the latest iPhones, Macs, and Watches, is pondering leaving the company, Bloomberg reports. A departing executive per se is barely an issue for a multi-trillion behemoth like Apple, but this one may have implications for the whole roadmap driving the company.

As Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reports, Apple is entering one of the most turbulent periods of Tim Cook's era, as several senior leaders and advanced engineers exit the company. This upheaval raises questions about the company's organizational sustainability amid the inflection points that artificial intelligence brings to usage models and to actual devices on both hardware and software levels. Perhaps this is most disturbing for Apple, given its vertical integration. Yet, there is no official information that Sroiji is leaving at the time of writing.

Apple Silicon organization could lose its unifying center

As the custom silicon leader at Apple, Srouji integrates at least four mission-critical Apple domains: CPU/GPU microarchitecture direction, perhaps NPU accelerator design, 5G modem direction, packaging and integration strategy, and foundry negotiations (given all of the above) with TSMC and the node-adoption schedule. So while officially he is 'engineering leadership' his possibilities bring him forwards to the whole portfolio orchestration. Still, given Apple's opaqueness about pretty much everything that concerns its plans, I could have missed something.

Apple’s silicon organization is designed around deep specialization with a single coordinating center, and that center is Johny Srouji. Even with two seasoned deputies — Zongjian Chen on CPU architecture and Sribalan Santhanam on SoC integration — no one else currently spans CPUs, GPUs, NPU development, packaging strategy, and foundry negotiation at the same time. If Srouji steps aside, Apple still retains strong execution teams, but it loses the unifying authority that keeps long-range planning, cross-team workloads and platform-level decisions synchronized.

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Anton Shilov
Anton Shilov
Contributing Writer

Anton Shilov is a contributing writer at Tom’s Hardware. Over the past couple of decades, he has covered everything from CPUs and GPUs to supercomputers and from modern process technologies and latest fab tools to high-tech industry trends.

28 Comments Comment from the forums
  • hotaru251
    I do wonder if he sees stagnation arriving (we still don't really know how well arm scales or how the difficulty increases to get that scaling) and wants to move to a place where can work on soemthing new and advance at faster rate. Given how much they (apple) spend on R&D weird for him to want to leave but not for retirement reasons
    Reply
  • LordVile
    hotaru251 said:
    I do wonder if he sees stagnation arriving (we still don't really know how well arm scales or how the difficulty increases to get that scaling) and wants to move to a place where can work on soemthing new and advance at faster rate. Given how much they (apple) spend on R&D weird for him to want to leave but not for retirement reasons
    Sometimes people just want a new challenge. Money isn’t an issue when you get to that level
    Reply
  • Heat_Fan89
    Nothing last forever, including Apple's dominance in technology. Many gripe, complain and criticize Tim Cook for how he's run Apple, post Steve Jobs. IMO, he's done what you want any CEO to do, as he's turned it into a more consumer friendly brand. That has upset many traditional and loyalists Mac users who live in the past.

    The core group that put Apple in this position of dominance are getting older and are leaving for various reasons. I have no doubt that the current core group are realizing this and have decided to turn Apple more towards entertainment.
    Reply
  • Heat_Fan89
    This is where Steve Jobs excelled at, by figuring the next evolution rather than revolution to where a product might be years out.

    This video could be fake or could be real but the point is that there's always something that ends up being disruptive to a stabilized industry as DeepSeek did to OpenAI. Someone or company will find a new twist or more cost effective or efficient way of doing things.

    If Samsung is working on this transparent smart phone it could shake up the industry.

    A1YO6uPGK0wView: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1YO6uPGK0w
    Reply
  • LordVile
    Heat_Fan89 said:
    Nothing last forever, including Apple's dominance in technology. Many gripe, complain and criticize Tim Cook for how he's run Apple, post Steve Jobs. IMO, he's done what you want any CEO to do, as he's turned it into a more consumer friendly brand. That has upset many traditional and loyalists Mac users who live in the past.

    The core group that put Apple in this position of dominance are getting older and are leaving for various reasons. I have no doubt that the current core group are realizing this and have decided to turn Apple more towards entertainment.
    He hasn’t though. If anything it’s less consumer friendly and more about profits. A lot of apples missteps recently have been shareholder focused which would not have happened under jobs
    Reply
  • hotaru251
    Heat_Fan89 said:
    as he's turned it into a more consumer friendly brand.
    not even.
    Apple today is "fudge the user wants you do what WE say"
    &
    "oh you buy our expensive headset? hope you spent more on an ipad or iphone becasue you aint able to update w/o giving us more of your $ 1st!"
    They are poster child of anti consumer brand.
    Reply
  • bit_user
    Heat_Fan89 said:
    This is where Steve Jobs excelled at, by figuring the next evolution rather than revolution to where a product might be years out.

    This video could be fake or could be real but the point is that there's always something that ends up being disruptive to a stabilized industry
    For a while, everyone (i.e. Apple, Google, and Microsoft) seemed to think this would be AR. IMO, the final word on AR has yet to be written, with some of the biggest hurdles to adoption still being bulk, weight, battery life, etc.

    Essentially, I think Vision Pro was sort of like the Apple Lisa. A technical tour de force that showed what was possible, but not in a form and price point the market could embrace. Or, you could liken it to early smart phones, that hadn't yet hit upon the iPhone's winning formula. Basically, AR still needs its Macintosh or iPhone moment, in order to see an inflection point in adoption.

    In related news, I just heard that Meta announced like 30% cuts in its Metaverse division. Zuck might still turn out to be right about the metaverse, but there's such a thing as being right too soon.

    As for this latest development at Apple, I still think the biggest threat to the relevance of Apple's silicon was the core team members leaving to form Nuvia. They survived that development and got back on track with even stronger and more competitive cores. After seeing that, I'm not sure anything is going to derail them. At least, anything that's not a revolutionary shift in CPU microarchitectures, like VISC. I think Apple doesn't even have anything to worry about from RISC-V. It's got to be more ground-breaking than that.

    In terms of Apple's market leadership, AI could be a gap in their armor. They still need to partner to stay relevant in this area, where as Google is an industry leading powerhouse on AI.
    Reply
  • ezst036
    Heat_Fan89 said:
    Nothing last forever, including Apple's dominance in technology. Many gripe, complain and criticize Tim Cook for how he's run Apple, post Steve Jobs. IMO, he's done what you want any CEO to do, as he's turned it into a more consumer friendly brand. That has upset many traditional and loyalists Mac users who live in the past.

    The core group that put Apple in this position of dominance are getting older and are leaving for various reasons. I have no doubt that the current core group are realizing this and have decided to turn Apple more towards entertainment.
    Apple isn't the one in danger right now. It's Microsoft.

    There are always gripes with any product range, I've got my gripes with every Linux distro I've tried and gripes with SteamOS.

    However, the most unpopular product right now is Windows 11 and the new announcements of moving into Agentic are only making people scared. Having a product that people hate that also scares people is not a good recipe for the future.

    This puts Apple in a sweet spot for future gains. They are gaining right now. The big beneficiary of Microsoft's suicide isn't Linux. Linux is only the little beneficiary. For at least the next few years, Apple can afford to not be seen as "the next big thing" as we go through this new market paradigm shift. Apple is going to gain simply because they exist and hey, a Mac is genuinely and sincerely a quality product.
    Reply
  • LordVile
    ezst036 said:
    Apple isn't the one in danger right now. It's Microsoft.

    There are always gripes with any product range, I've got my gripes with every Linux distro I've tried and gripes with SteamOS.

    However, the most unpopular product right now is Windows 11 and the new announcements of moving into Agentic are only making people scared. Having a product that people hate that also scares people is not a good recipe for the future.

    This puts Apple in a sweet spot for future gains. They are gaining right now. The big beneficiary of Microsoft's suicide isn't Linux. Linux is only the little beneficiary. For at least the next few years, Apple can afford to not be seen as "the next big thing" as we go through this new market paradigm shift. Apple is going to gain simply because they exist and hey, a Mac is genuinely and sincerely a quality product.
    Not really as Microsoft’s profit largely from Azure and business services now rather than pure Windows sales.

    The biggest thing now would be AI, Google and Microsoft have sunk a lot of money into it with very little to show for it. There’s no clear route to a profitable product and the house of cards could easily topple and burn both. Apple on the other hand hasn’t massively overcommitted to AI and barring some advertising blunders wouldn’t be as badly affected and are largely isolated if the bubble bursts
    Reply
  • bit_user
    LordVile said:
    Not really as Microsoft’s profit largely from Azure and business services now rather than pure Windows sales.
    But Windows is the premier delivery portal for those services! Without Windows, Microsoft would be getting a lot less Azure business - particularly if its business customers move away from running Windows on their client machines.
    Reply