Apple Organizational Structure

About the company

Apple Inc. designs consumer hardware, writes the operating systems that run on it, designs much of the silicon inside it, and sells a services business layered across the installed base. Fiscal 2025 net sales were $416.2 billion against roughly 166,000 full-time equivalent employees, from a single headquarters in Cupertino and a contract manufacturing base it does not own.

The reason Apple's org chart is worth reading is that it does not look like the org chart of any other company its size. Firms with hundreds of billions in revenue are almost universally divisional: a general manager owns a product line, its revenue and its costs, and the centre arbitrates between them. Apple abolished that arrangement in 1997 and has never reinstated it, so the shape below is a functional organisation stretched to a scale nobody else runs one at.

This snapshot is dated August 2026 for a specific reason. On 20 April 2026 Apple announced that Tim Cook will become Executive Chairman and that John Ternus, then senior vice president of hardware engineering, becomes chief executive on 1 September 2026. Cook is still CEO on the date of this chart and is drawn at the root; from 1 September the root of the real chart is Ternus, and which of the eighteen direct reports below survive that change has not been announced.

Apple Inc. organizational chart

Apple Inc.'s reporting structure as of 2026-08. Drag to pan, scroll to zoom — or open it in QueryChart and edit it as your own.

One P&L, eighteen direct reports, and nobody in the middle

There is one root and, essentially, one layer beneath it. Eighteen people report to the chief executive. Ten are officers or senior vice presidents who own a discipline across the entire product range: hardware engineering, hardware overall, software engineering, operations, services and health, finance, legal, government affairs, retail and people, and worldwide marketing. The other eight report to the CEO with no senior vice president above them at all — industrial design, human interface design, worldwide sales, marketing communications, worldwide communications, corporate services, corporate development, and the Apple Fellow who runs the App Store. The third level shown here is deliberately thin: AI and the Vision Products Group under software engineering, and Greater China under operations.

That shape is a deliberate inheritance. When Steve Jobs returned in 1997 he removed the general managers of Apple's business units in a single day and merged their departments into one functional organisation on one profit-and-loss statement. The consequence is structural rather than cultural: because nobody below the chief executive is accountable for the profit of a product, an iPhone-versus-Mac trade-off has no owner short of the executive team, and the CEO is in effect the only general manager Apple has. Apple's stated preference for putting deep domain experts rather than career general managers into leadership follows from the same decision — a function head is expected to be the most qualified person in the company at the thing the function does.

The functional shape is what makes Apple's reorganisations cheap, and there have been many since mid-2025. Sabih Khan replaced Jeff Williams as chief operating officer; Kevan Parekh replaced Luca Maestri as chief financial officer, with Maestri moving to corporate services; health moved into Eddy Cue's organisation, whose title became services and health; and when Williams retired, design lost the senior vice president layer it had sat under since 2019 — Molly Anderson on industrial design and Steve Lemay on human interface design now report to the CEO as separate vice presidents. On 20 April 2026 Apple named Johny Srouji chief hardware officer, folding hardware engineering into hardware technologies and giving Apple one hardware leader for the first time in a decade. None of these moves required renegotiating a divisional budget, which is why they happen at this rate. Government affairs still sits beside legal as a separate senior vice presidency, an arrangement press reporting has described as temporary.

Two limits on this reconstruction are worth stating before the chart is read as authoritative. Apple publishes no org chart, so the leadership page and its press releases are the whole public record, and two lines here come from journalism rather than an Apple statement: Mike Rockwell's Siri work under Craig Federighi, and Phil Schiller's direct line to the chief executive. Isabel Ge Mahe is a different case — Apple states she reports to both the chief executive and the chief operating officer, and a single-parent tree cannot draw that, so she is placed under Sabih Khan and the second line is described rather than drawn. Apple's own leadership page had also not caught up with the April 2026 hardware announcement at the time of writing, so the titles here follow the newsroom release.

Key leadership roles

1. Tim Cook

   Chief Executive Officer — Becomes Executive Chairman on 1 September 2026, when John Ternus takes over as CEO; he is shown at the root because he holds the role on the date of this chart.

2. John Ternus

   Senior Vice President, Hardware Engineering — Named on 20 April 2026 as Apple's next chief executive, effective 1 September 2026; his operating remit in the interim, after hardware engineering was folded into Srouji's organisation, is not clear from public sources.

3. Johny Srouji

   Chief Hardware Officer — Apple silicon and product hardware engineering under one leader since April 2026 — the first consolidation of Apple's two hardware functions in a decade.

4. Craig Federighi

   Senior Vice President, Software Engineering — Owns every operating system Apple ships, and since the December 2025 retirement of the machine-learning leadership, the AI organisation as well.

5. Amar Subramanya

   Vice President, AI — One of the few externally hired leaders in this chart; AI sits inside software engineering rather than as its own senior vice presidency.

6. Mike Rockwell

   Vice President, Vision Products Group — Placed under software engineering on the strength of press reporting on his leadership of Siri, not an Apple statement — the least certain line in this chart.

7. Sabih Khan

   Chief Operating Officer — Took the role from Jeff Williams in 2025 after decades inside Apple's operations organisation, which commits supply-chain capacity years ahead of a launch.

8. Isabel Ge Mahe

   Vice President and Managing Director, Greater China — Apple states she reports to BOTH the chief executive and the chief operating officer; this chart is a single-parent tree, so only the COO line is drawn and the second one exists but cannot be shown.

9. Kevan Parekh

   Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer — Succeeded Luca Maestri in 2025; with no divisional P&Ls beneath him, finance is where product cost and pricing decisions actually sit.

10. Eddy Cue

    Senior Vice President, Services and Health — The health organisation moved into his remit when the chief operating officer role changed hands, which is what added Health to the title.

11. Phil Schiller

    Apple Fellow, App Store and Apple Events — Drawn reporting to the chief executive, which is the conventional reading for an Apple Fellow running the App Store rather than a line Apple has published.

12. Deirdre O'Brien

    Senior Vice President, Retail + People — One senior vice president owns both the retail estate and the human-resources function, an unusual pairing that exists because Apple's stores are also its largest employer of hourly staff.

13. Greg Joswiak

    Senior Vice President, Worldwide Marketing — Product marketing sits at the same level as engineering, but marketing communications and worldwide communications are separate vice presidencies reporting to the CEO rather than to him.

14. Molly Anderson

    Vice President, Industrial Design — Industrial design reports to the chief executive again, alongside Steve Lemay on human interface design — the first time since 1997 that design has had no single head.

How this structure supports the business

The functional structure is a bet that integration is worth more than accountability. A company that designs its own processors, writes its own operating systems and assembles its own hardware needs those three roadmaps committed to each other years in advance, and a divisional owner defending a separate budget is precisely the thing that stops that happening. With one profit-and-loss statement there is no internal transfer price to negotiate, so the choice between a costlier component and a better product is made once, by people who own the whole outcome rather than a slice of it.

It also puts the deepest expert in each discipline in charge of that discipline everywhere, instead of distributing adequate versions of the same expertise across several divisions. That concentration is what lets Apple argue about implementation detail at the top of the company rather than delegating it to generalists — and it is why the executive team is unusually technical for a firm of this size and unusually stable, since the roles are filled by people who have spent decades in the function.

The very wide span at the top is the other half of the design. Eighteen direct reports means there is no interpretive layer between the chief executive and the function heads, and it lets Apple recombine functions almost at will: health into services, environment under the chief operating officer, hardware engineering into hardware technologies. Each of those was a title change and a reporting change, not a restructuring of anybody's numbers.

Advantages and disadvantages

One profit-and-loss statement and one set of functional roadmaps make long-horizon integration possible: silicon, operating systems and product hardware can be committed to a shared plan years out, with no divisional owner defending a separate budget against it.

Every genuinely cross-functional trade-off has to escalate to the executive team, which makes the chief executive's calendar a structural bottleneck and concentrates an unusual amount of company risk in a single succession event — exactly the event scheduled for 1 September 2026.

Promoting domain experts into leadership keeps technical judgement next to decision rights, so the people arguing about a camera pipeline or a compiler at the top of Apple are people who have built one.

It produces almost no executives who have ever carried commercial ownership. Nobody below the chief executive has run a business with its own P&L, which effectively rules out an external CEO and means an internal one arrives untested on the one dimension the job adds.

Functions recombine cheaply. Moving health into services, or merging hardware engineering into hardware technologies, costs a title and a reporting line rather than a renegotiated divisional target — which is why Apple has done both within twelve months.

The same cheapness makes the moves invisible and poorly documented from outside. Apple's own leadership page still carried pre-April-2026 titles for its two hardware leaders months after the change was announced, so any external chart of Apple is reconstructing from a record the company does not maintain.

Eighteen direct reports keeps the chief executive in unmediated contact with every function, and removes the layer of translation that a divisional structure inserts between the top of the company and the working level.

A span that wide leaves very little time per function, and it puts vice presidents running design or communications into the same queue for the CEO's attention as senior vice presidents running organisations ten times their size.

Interesting facts

• Apple announced on 20 April 2026 that Tim Cook becomes Executive Chairman and John Ternus becomes chief executive on 1 September 2026 — the first CEO change since 2011, and the first time the successor comes from hardware engineering rather than from operations.
• Apple has run on a single company-wide profit-and-loss statement since 1997. No executive below the chief executive is accountable for the profit of a product line, so an iPhone-versus-Mac trade-off has no natural owner other than the executive team itself.
• The five segments Apple reports to the SEC — Americas, Europe, Greater China, Japan and Rest of Asia Pacific — are geographic sales segments for financial reporting only. They have no counterpart in the management structure, which is why an Apple 10-K says almost nothing about how the company is run.
• Exactly one region has a named executive on Apple's leadership page: the vice president and managing director of Greater China, a post with a dual reporting line to both the chief executive and the chief operating officer. No other country or region carries an equivalent role.
• Design lost its senior vice president layer in late 2025. Having sat under the chief operating officer since 2019, industrial design and human interface design were split into two vice presidencies reporting straight to the chief executive — the first time since 1997 that design has had no single head.
• Because engineering owns no revenue line, engineering leaders are structurally insulated from pricing: product cost and price decisions sit with finance and the executive team. That is a designed consequence of the functional model, not an accident of who happens to hold the roles.

Frequently asked questions

Who is Apple's CEO right now, and is that changing?

Tim Cook is chief executive as of August 2026, which is the date this chart depicts. Apple announced on 20 April 2026 that Cook becomes Executive Chairman and that John Ternus, senior vice president of hardware engineering, becomes chief executive on 1 September 2026. If you are reading this after that date, the root of Apple's real chart is Ternus, and Apple has not said which of the eighteen direct reports shown here will report to him.

Is Apple's organizational structure functional or divisional?

Functional, and unusually purely so for a company of its size. Senior vice presidents own disciplines — hardware, software, operations, services, marketing, finance, legal, retail — across the entire product range, and the company runs on one consolidated profit-and-loss statement. There is no iPhone division, no Mac division and no services division with its own budget.

How many people report directly to Apple's CEO?

Roughly eighteen on the public record. Ten are officers or senior vice presidents heading a function; the remaining eight are vice presidents and one Apple Fellow — design, sales, communications, corporate development, corporate services and the App Store — who report to the chief executive with no senior vice president above them. That mix of tiers reporting to one person is a distinctive feature of Apple's chart, not an artefact of this reconstruction.

Why is Apple's Greater China lead the only region on the chart?

Because Greater China is the only geography Apple gives a named executive on its leadership page. Isabel Ge Mahe holds the post, and Apple states she reports to both the chief executive and the chief operating officer. This chart is a single-parent tree, so only the COO line is drawn; the second reporting line is real and simply cannot be represented as a tree edge.

How accurate can an outside org chart of Apple be?

Accurate at the named leadership layer and a reconstruction below it. Apple publishes a leadership page and press releases but no org chart, no headcount by function and no reporting lines beneath its executives. Everything at the third level of this diagram is drawn from those public statements or, where noted, from press reporting, and any chart of Apple that claims more than that is guessing.

Use this org chart template

Open Apple's functional structure as an editable org chart, then swap in your own functions, tiers and reporting lines to see what a one-P&L organisation would look like at your size.

Open this org chart as your own