Dan Riccio, one of Apple’s most prominent executives for more than 20 years, will leave the company this month, Bloomberg reports, citing people familiar with the move.
According to reports, Riccio has been planning his retirement for the past five years and said his final day of retirement will be Friday, October 11th.
Riccio started working at Apple in 1998 and became head of hardware engineering by 2012. In that role, he oversaw several major hardware developments for Apple, including the evolution of AirPods, the latest iPhone, the iPad Pro, and more.
During that time, he held the title of Senior Vice President of Hardware Engineering, but moved to a new role within the company in January 2021. At the time, the public initially only knew that he was working on a “new project,” but it soon became clear that the project in question was what would become Apple’s Vision Pro augmented reality headset, which was released in February of this year. It became clear that.
The group that produced Vision Pro is known internally as Vision Products Group. This is a group of 2,000 engineers that Riccio has been overseeing since 2021. He was also involved in the development of Project Titan, Apple’s smart car initiative that was ultimately abandoned.
