Apple on Friday named Tim Cook its Chief Operating Officer (COO). Cook has been Apple’s executive vice president of Worldwide Sales and Operations since 2002. What’s more, Apple’s senior vice president of the iPod Division, Jon Rubinstein, will retire in March, 2006, to be succeeded by Tony Fadell.
“Tim has been doing this job for over two years now, and it’s high time we officially recognized it with this promotion,” said Apple CEO Steve Jobs in a statement.
In his new role, Cook will continue to lead the company’s Macintosh division, and will continue to be responsible for all of Apple’s sales and operations efforts. He’ll report directly to Steve Jobs, just as he is now.
Cook joined Apple in 1998 and senior vice president of Operations, and was promoted to his EVP role in 2002. Prior to joining Apple Cook worked at Compaq and spent more than a decade at IBM.
In announcing Rubinstein’s retirement, Jobs said, “Jon has done an excellent job as a member of Apple’s senior management team, as well as building our world-class iPod engineering team and running our hardware engineering team prior to that.”
Rubinstein’s successor, Tony Fadell, has been part of the iPod Engineering team since 2001, and was promoted to vice president of iPod engineering in 2004. Before joining Apple, Fadell worked at Philips Electronics, and was a software and hardware architect at General Magic.