When Bob Mansfield, Apple’s senior vice president of Hardware Engineering, announced his impending retirement in June, Apple CEO Tim Cook faced an “insurrection” by “several senior engineers on Mansfield’s team,” according to “Bloomberg Businessweek” (http://macte.ch/HaMlS).
Purportedly, the engineers felt that Mansfield’s replacement, Dan Riccio, “was unprepared for the magnitude of the role,” the article adds. So Cook approached Mansfield and offered him a package of cash and stock worth around US$2 million a month to stay on at Apple as an adviser and help manage the hardware engineering team, according to “Bloomberg Businessweek.”
At the time of his announced retirement, the plan was for Mansfield’s to be transitioned to Dan Riccio, Apple’s vice president of iPad Hardware Engineering, over several months. As senior vice president of Hardware Engineering, Mansfield has led Mac hardware engineering since 2005, iPhone and iPod hardware engineering since 2010, and iPad hardware engineering since its inception.
Mansfield joined Apple in 1999 when Apple acquired Raycer Graphics, where he was vice president of Engineering. Mansfield earned a BSEE degree from the University of Texas at Austin in 1982.
Riccio currently serves as vice president of iPad Hardware Engineering and has been instrumental in all of Apple’s iPad products since the first generation iPad. Riccio joined Apple in 1998 as vice president of Product Design and has been a key contributor to most of Apple’s hardware over his career. He earned a bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1986.
