Dan Riccio has been an important executive at Apple through the Steve Jobs and Tim Cook eras, and he’s retiring after leading the Apple Vision Pro team.
John Ternus took over as the Senior Vice President of Hardware Engineering after Dan Riccio left the position. Riccio continued to report to Tim Cook as a vice president leading the Apple Vision Pro team, but he’s now set to retire.
According to a report from Bloomberg, Dan Riccio is retiring imminently. The day-to-day operations on the Apple Vision Pro team will be taken over by Mike Rockwell, and oversight will fall under John Ternus.
Dan Riccio has been an incredible influence on Apple since he joined the company in 1998. He became the SVP of Hardware Engineering in 2012 and helped herald products like AirPods and the iPad Pro, but was also the mind behind projects like the ill-fated Apple Car.
While some might call Riccio’s departure a bad sign for Apple Vision Pro’s performance or its future, that’s a highly unlikely conclusion. The reality is Apple’s shown a pattern of cushioning executive retirements with smaller positions before they ultimately depart — like with Jony Ive or Phil Schiller.
Dan Riccio has spent 26 years with Apple and had a very successful career. As always with these kinds of stories, retirement is inevitable for someone over 60, and it isn’t usually related to some kind of failure but rather a history of success and wealth, especially at Apple.
