Another familiar name is stepping out of the daily spotlight at Apple. Longtime executive Phil Schiller has given up control of the App Store and the company’s product launch events, a change first reported by Bloomberg, citing people familiar with the matter. Schiller isn’t heading for the exit, but he’s clearly trading a punishing workload for something smaller, and word inside the company is that he’ll spend his time on projects nobody’s naming just yet.
The timing says a lot. Schiller’s move landed on the same day Tim Cook worked his last shift as CEO before handing the title to John Ternus, with Cook sliding into the newly created role of Apple Chairman after roughly fifteen years running the show. People inside Apple see Schiller’s pullback as another sign he’s inching toward retirement, even if nobody’s using that word out loud.
His history with the company goes back further than most. Schiller joined Apple in 1987, left in 1993, then rejoined in 1997, right around the time Steve Jobs returned to fix a company that badly needed fixing. From there, he became one of the executives most tied to Apple’s biggest product moments, standing behind the launches of the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad, and the Apple Watch. When he gave up the marketing chief title back in 2020 to become an Apple Fellow, he framed it as a chance to finally make room for family and friends and whatever else he’d been putting off, while still promising to stick around Apple for as long as the company wanted him.
That lighter schedule he’d hoped for never really showed up. The Wall Street Journal reported in 2024 that Schiller was still logging close to 80 hours a week, most of it swallowed by App Store duties during one of the roughest patches in the store’s history. That stretch included Apple’s ongoing fight to fall in line with the European Union’s Digital Markets Act, a drawn-out legal battle with Epic Games, and fresh regulatory demands from countries like Brazil and Japan piling on top of everything else.
Now that Schiller’s stepping back, the App Store is heading to services chief Eddy Cue, who ran it once before, back until 2015, and is expected to carry even more weight under Ternus going forward. Carson Oliver, who’s been on the App Store team for years, will handle the day-to-day work, while Nola Weinstein, Schiller’s deputy since 2023, moves into leading Apple’s events team and will now answer to communications and public relations vice president Kristin Huguet Quayle. Schiller, for his part, keeps his Apple Fellow title as all of this takes effect.
