Two Apple executives — Jon Rubinstein, senior vice president of hardware engineering and Avadis “Avie” Tevanian, chief software technology officer — have made the first-ever CRN 25 Innovators List which features “the hands-on technical gurus and product visionaries behind some of this year’s most talked-about technologies.” (CRN offers “vital information for VARs [value added resellers] and technology integrators.”)
Rubinstein’s hardware team was praised for such products as the iPod, AirPort Extreme and the Power Mac G5. The Apple vice president “brings more than 25 years of industry experience to Apple, where his team is responsible for the development, design and low-level software contributions for all hardware products,” CRN says.
Before working at Apple, Rubinstein was an executive vice president and chief operating office of FirePower Systems, a developer and manufacturer of PowerPC-based systems, and was vice president of hardware engineering at NeXT, the company Steve Jobs founded between his two stints at Apple. He has also designed the HP 9000 series and 300 families of Unix workstations for Hewlett-Packard been in charge of processor development for the Titan graphics supercomputer family at Stardent Computer.
“Innovation is in our [Apple’s] DNA, so we’ll continue to lead the industry with breakthrough products,” Rubinstein told CRN.
Tevanian and his engineering team have “blurred the line between fantasy and reality when it comes to what can be accomplished with software,” CRN says.
He first made a name for himself at Carnegie Mellon, where he was designer and engineer of the Mach operating system. Tevanian then joined NeXT as a NeXTStep engineer in January 1988. Tevanian told CRN that he has built an organization at Apple that is capable of just about anything, and that the team has laid a foundation for unprecedented future innovation in software, both inside and outside the operating system.
“I am particularly proud of Mac OS X; it signifies a whole new era in personal computing,” he added. “Never before had an interface combined the power and stability of Unix with the Mac’s legendary ease of use.”