Apple is seeing another high-profile executive from the Tim Cook era scale back his remaining responsibilities, as former chief financial officer Luca Maestri has dropped his role overseeing corporate services.
Maestri, who handed the CFO title to Kevan Parekh at the end of 2024, had stayed on as a vice president running corporate services. That group covered information systems and technology, information security, and corporate real estate. According to Bloomberg News‘ Mark Gurman, Maestri stepped away from those duties in recent weeks. He remains on Apple’s payroll, but now has no operational responsibilities beyond teaching a class at Apple University. He visits the office about once a week and is winding down toward retirement.
The corporate services portfolio has shifted to current CFO Kevan Parekh. Maestri previously reported to Cook and does not report to new CEO John Ternus, who took over this week. Cook often kept departing senior leaders in reduced roles; it is unclear whether Ternus will follow the same practice.
Maestri’s earlier tenure as CFO also drew scrutiny over Apple’s artificial-intelligence pace. Reports have said that in 2023, after Cook approved a plan to roughly double the company’s GPU budget for AI work, Maestri reduced the increase to less than half of what had been requested and pushed the team to extract more efficiency from existing chips. Critics have argued that the more conservative spending left Apple with fewer modern accelerators than rivals and contributed to the company falling behind in the generative-AI race.
Apple has since ramped up AI investment under its Apple Intelligence initiative and a leadership transition that puts greater emphasis on the technology. Maestri’s latest step back marks one more change as Ternus begins reshaping the company’s senior ranks.
MacDailyNews Take: Hopefully Ternus will drop Cook’s milquetoast habit of keeping longtime executives known for poor, costly decisions on the payroll in low-responsibility jobs. Cut ’em loose and focus in the future, John!
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