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

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.

One of the sources of Apple's success in the last three decades has been its custom silicon, tailored just for its devices. Over the years, development of these system-on-chips (SoCs) was led by three people, and since 2014 it has been led by Johny Srouji. Thus, Srouji happens to be responsible for development of the company's whole SoCs initiative — starting from the humble Apple Watch and all the way to massive Mac Studio.

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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