Apple said Johny Srouji will become its chief hardware officer effective immediately, putting one of the company’s most influential engineering leaders in charge of both Hardware Engineering and the hardware technologies organization. John Ternus, who most recently oversaw Hardware Engineering, said he looks forward to continuing to work closely with Srouji in their new roles.
The move gives Srouji broader responsibility across the part of Apple that creates and builds all of its hardware products, including product design, system engineering and reliability and durability testing. He had most recently been senior vice president of Hardware Technologies, a job that put him at the center of the company’s chip and component strategy as Apple continued to fold more of its own technology into its devices.
Tim Cook said Srouji has played a singular role in driving Apple’s silicon strategy and that his influence has been felt deeply inside the company and across the industry. Cook also said Srouji has led his organization with remarkable deftness and judgment, and that its teams have delivered breakthrough innovations that transformed Apple’s products.
The promotion reflects how central Srouji has become to Apple’s hardware playbook since he joined the company in 2008 to lead development of A4, the first Apple-designed system on a chip. Since then, he has overseen breakthroughs in custom chips and hardware technologies that Apple said span Apple silicon, batteries, cameras, storage controllers, sensors, displays and cellular modems, while building one of the world’s strongest teams of silicon and technology engineers.
The shift also comes as Apple keeps more of its hardware decision-making under leaders who have spent years inside the company’s engineering machine, which works closely with industrial design, hardware technologies, software engineering and operations. Srouji’s background runs deep in processors and design: before Apple, he held senior positions at Intel and IBM, and he earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer science from Technion, Israel’s Institute of Technology. The question now is how far Apple pushes that hardware integration under his leadership as the company’s product line keeps tightening around its own chips and technologies.