Apple’s top hardware engineer, Bob Mansfield, is not leaving the company after all and will stay to work on future products, Apple announced Monday.
Apple said in June that Mansfield, its senior vice president of hardware engineering, would be retiring as soon as he had transitioned a replacement, Dan Riccio, into his role.
On Monday, Apple announced that Riccio has taken over Mansfield’s job as planned, and is now senior vice president in charge of hardware development for Apple’s Mac, iPhone, iPad and iPod products.
But it also revealed that Mansfield has decided to remain at Apple, at least for now. “Mansfield will work on future products, reporting to Tim Cook,” Apple said in a statement. It didn’t reply to a request for comment about Mansfield’s new role. He is still listed under his old job title on Apple’s website.
In June, Mansfield wrote a letter to customers saying Apple will remain in EPEAT, reversing a controversial decision to remove its products from the environmental rating system.
Apple also announced Monday that Craig Federighi was being promoted to senior vice president of Mac Software Engineering, and will continue to lead Mac software development. Federighi, formerly vice president, once worked at NeXT, which was founded by Steve Jobs. After a stint at Ariba, Federighi returned to Apple in 2009 to head Mac OS X software development.
In their new jobs, Riccio and Federighi are part of Apple’s executive management team and report directly to CEO Tim Cook.
The promotions come as Apple’s rivals hire away talented executives from the company. AMD recently hired Apple’s former platform architect Jim Keller to run its processor division.
Agam Shah covers PCs, tablets, servers, chips and semiconductors for IDG News Service. Follow Agam on Twitter at @agamsh. Agam’s e-mail address is agam_shah@idg.com