Inevitably, reports of key Apple executives leaving have prompted more Apple-is-doomed headlines that even absurdly claim the iPhone is at risk.
Head of design Alan Dye is leaving Apple, head of environment Lisa Jackson is about to retire, and the list goes on. The list will keep going on, even after Tim Cook eventually makes headlines for retiring.
These people are unquestionably an important part of Apple's success in recent years, to the extent that the company might look very different if they had left sooner. Some, like Lisa Jackson, definitely seem to be a big loss, although Alan Dye's departure is said to be making Apple staffers giddy with delight.
What none of them represent, though, is the end of Apple. They don't even represent the end of Apple as we know it.
Following a series of Bloomberg articles portraying every individual departure as calamitous, now the Wall Street Journal has joined in. Its latest report looks at the overall pattern of mass departures, and has done so after exhaustive research.
"Dozens of Apple engineers and designers with expertise in audio, watch design, robotics, and more have decamped to OpenAI in recent months," says the publication, before quietly explaining that this is all "according to a review of LinkedIn profiles."
Like any other social media platform, LinkedIn is powered by what its users choose to post. People who join Apple quite often don't update their LinkedIn profile because of various restrictions placed on their hiring.
People who leave Apple but don't have anywhere to go tend to puff up their profile in the attempt to sound more employable.
And the giant majority of LinkedIn users set up a profile when they joined but haven't given it a thought since. LinkedIn is interesting, but it cannot give anything like a statistically valid picture of any company's employment.
Other sources can try. Various market research firms put Apple's current total number of staff at around 164,000.
The truth of the matter is that yes, each one of these executives was important, and none of them should have their contribution diminished at all. But every single one of them is not only replaceable, they are being replaced.
All of this has happened before
It is said that Alan Dye's leaving is a surprise, but none of the retirements are. Just as there is unquestionably a succession plan for Tim Cook, there has been for every single senior executive.
There always has been, there always will be — and there's something else that is constant, too. Apple has always been reported to be doomed because one person or another has left.
Back in 1997, Steve Jobs even talked at length about this during his famous Fireside Chat. He was telling developers about his reasons for having killed off certain Apple projects on his return to the company, and how that had led to a lot of bad press.
"When you say no, you piss off people, and they go talk to the San Jose Mercury and they write a shitty article about you, you know?" said Steve Jobs. "And it's really a pisser because you want to be nice, you don't want to tell the San Jose Mercury [that] the person that's telling you this, you know, just was asked to leave or this or that."
"So you take the lumps, and Apple's been taking their share of lumps for the last six months in a very unfair way," he continued. "We've been taking them like an adult, and I'm proud of that, and there's more to come, I'm sure. There's more to come."
Steve Jobs — image credit: Apple
"I read these articles about some of these people that have left. I know some of these people," said Jobs. "They haven't done anything in seven years, and they leave, and it's like the company's going to fall apart the next day."
The only thing we can learn from LinkedIn and the many reports of departures is that people move around in the industry. Sometimes, shockingly, they move because they are offered incredible sums.
