Apple shares have declined 15% this year, part of a broader retreat for tech stocks. They fell less than 1% to $214.10 on Thursday in New York.
By tapping Rockwell, Apple is betting on an executive with proven technical experience. He has demonstrated the ability to ship new products and run an engineering organization with thousands of people. Rockwell has a knack for solving problems and often takes the role of evangelist for futuristic technologies.
Rockwell is known as the brains behind the Vision Pro, which is considered a technical marvel but not a commercial hit. Getting the headset to market required a number of technical breakthroughs, some of which leveraged forms of artificial intelligence. He is now moving away from the Vision Pro at a time when that unit is struggling to plot a future for the product.
Over the last decade, Rockwell has been one of the few Apple executives to take a major hardware device from “zero to one” — industry parlance for conceiving a new product and bringing it to market. He joined Apple’s hardware engineering group in 2015, and the company released the Vision Pro in February of last year.
Giannandrea has a different background. A former Google star, he was hired in 2018 to run Apple’s AI work. Giannandrea had been one of Alphabet Inc.’s most senior executives, overseeing the search and AI divisions. Rockwell, in contrast, doesn’t have prior experience as an AI leader or clout within the burgeoning machine-learning community.
Apple has set the stage for the change by increasingly referring internally to the Vision Pro and VPG initiatives as “AI products.” Rockwell’s experience with hardware also could help the company more deeply embed AI into its future devices. Already, the company is exploring the idea of AirPods with outward-facing cameras that could feed data to AI.
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