Bob Mansfield, who was the Senior VP of technologies at Apple, has left his role but will still remain with the company. Mansfield will stay on to work on “special projects” and will report directly to Apple CEO Tim Cook. As reported by forbes.com:
“Mansfield’s photo and biography were removed from Apple’s leadership page in the last few days, prompting speculation that he had left Apple. Mansfield, who has worked on hardware engineering for Apple’s top selling products including the iPhone, iPad and Mac computer, announced his retirement in June 2012. But two months later, he was back with a continued role on Cook’s leadership team, which also includes longtime design chief Jony Ive and marketing chief Phil Schiller.”
Although there’s been much speculation that the “special projects” title is just a cover up and that he’s actually leaving, the previous arrangement is contrary to that notion. When he came back in 2012, Mansfield had agreed to stay with the company until 2014.
We’ll see how this story actually shakes out during the upcoming weeks, months and hopefully years. As stated, Bob Mansfield has been an integral part of Apple’s resurgence in the new millennium, leading the engineering for almost all of Apple’s major “post-pc” products. And while some people are spelling doom and gloom for Apple, there’s also a rumor that Mansfield is taking the new role to work on the highly coveted wearables in the technology space. Can somebody say, ‘iWatch?’
