What Does The Change In COO Mean For CEO Succession At Apple?

Forbes

09-07-2025

Apple's COO transition announced yesterday, with Jeff Williams stepping down in advance of retirement later this year and Sabih Khan assuming the role, offers a window into the company's internal calculus around CEO succession. For years, Williams was seen as the logical heir to Tim Cook. His departure removes the most plausible internal candidate for CEO—and with it, the long-standing assumption that Apple's next leader would, like Cook, rise through operations.
Steve Jobs was deliberate in his use of the COO role to prepare Tim Cook, to great effect.
The decision confirms that Apple is no longer grooming its future CEO from the operations function because Khan is not being positioned as a general manager. His portfolio is to be sharply focused on global manufacturing, logistics, and sustainability. Design, which Williams oversaw in addition to operations, will now report directly to Cook. That structural change eliminates the hybrid nature of the role that had made Williams uniquely qualified to step into the top job. What was once a single, broad mandate has now been split—and as a result, the pathway to the CEO suite has become obscured.
This is not simply a matter of COO personality or style. Williams embodied a model of leadership that united product vision, operational precision, and organizational continuity. Under his leadership, Apple launched the Watch, expanded into the health sector, and maintained extraordinary logistical consistency despite global disruptions. Khan, by contrast, is being tasked with a narrower but highly strategic mission: fortifying Apple's supply chain, localizing production, and driving environmental accountability. His work is essential—but it's not designed to cultivate public visibility, cross-functional leadership, or executive breadth. These are all potential elements of a COO role that Cook absolutely executed under Steve Jobs. Apple knows all this. They aren't miscasting Khan. They're restructuring the COO's responsibilities to match a different strategy.
That strategy is striking in what it omits: identifying a likely successor to Tim Cook.
For years, analysts assumed Williams would take the helm when Cook stepped down. The two had closely aligned roles with similar leadership philosophies, and their public personas were comfortably low-key. Now, that continuity is gone. No one on the current executive team combines Williams's depth of experience with the cross-functional influence needed to command across the enterprise. Services, Apple's fastest-growing division, has no visible successor candidate. Neither does marketing, finance, or product design. The bench is deep—but specialized. And that specialization, while operationally sound, leaves the succession question wide open.
Apple isn't buying time. It's signaling a shift. The company is no longer interested in creating another Tim Cook. It doesn't need to. Under Cook, Apple became the most operationally sophisticated technology company in history. But the next phase will be different. Apple is transitioning from being a company that invents new categories to one that defends its ecosystem, expands its services, and builds geopolitical resilience into its infrastructure. That phase requires a different kind of leadership—possibly one shaped by policy, regulation, global affairs, or platform strategy rather than supply chain mastery or industrial design.
By separating operations from design, Apple is closing the chapter that began when Cook succeeded Jobs. And with Williams's departure, the bridge between product innovation and executive leadership has been intentionally dismantled. Apple's next CEO will not come from the operations side. That era is over. The future leadership of Apple will emerge from a new corner of the organization—or from outside it entirely.
This COO transition isn't about who runs Apple next. It's about what kind of company Apple intends to be.