Apple on Friday announced that Tim Cook, the companyis executive vice-president of worldwide sales and operations, is now Chief Operating Officer (COO). Mr. Cook is now Appleis number two executive, behind CEO Steve Jobs. The company also said that Jon Rubinstein, senior vice-president of the iPod division, will retire on March 31, 2006. Tony Fadell, currently vice-president of iPod engineering, will succeed him.
"Tim has been doing this job for over two years now, and itis high time we officially recognized it with this promotion," Mr. Jobs said in a statement.
Of Mr. Rubinstein, he commented: "Iive worked with Jon for over 15 years, and weire going to miss him. Jon has done an excellent job as a member of Appleis senior management team, as well as building our world-class iPod engineering team and running our hardware engineering team prior to that."