The restructuring will see leadership roles reshuffled across its services, hardware, and health divisions.

Eddy Cue, senior vice president of Services, will now oversee Apple’s health and fitness divisions, and this could boost the company’s reported plan to launch a new subscription service, Health+, in 2026. 

The upcoming service is expected to provide personalised coaching across fitness, sleep, nutrition, and mental health, revealing Apple’s goal to turn wellness into a profitable, recurring-revenue business, much like Apple Music or iCloud.

Jeff Williams, who once led Apple’s health initiatives and was important in building the Apple Watch into a health-focused product, handed the COO role to Sabih Khan, formerly vice president of Operations, back in July. With Williams’ exit drawing near, Apple is redistributing his remaining responsibilities. 

According to Bloomberg, software chief Craig Federighi will take charge of watchOS, while hardware head John Ternus will lead Apple Watch engineering, an appointment that analysts see as a strategic nod to Ternus’s potential as a future successor to CEO Tim Cook, who turns 65 next year.

Again, Jay Blahnik, Apple’s fitness chief, will now report to Sumbul Desai, vice president of Health. This comes when an internal probe into the workplace is being conducted. Both executives previously reported directly to Williams. 

The New York Times earlier revealed that Blahnik was sued by a former employee who accused him of enabling a toxic work environment, an allegation that has placed additional issue on Apple’s corporate culture.

Meanwhile, Johnny Srouji, senior vice president of Hardware Technologies, is reportedly “evaluating his future at the tech giant”, months after his team delivered Apple’s first in-house modem, an achievement in the company’s long effort to reduce dependence on Qualcomm.

Sources reveal that Apple’s leadership transition could extend beyond Williams. Other top executives, including Lisa Jackson, who oversees Environment, and John Giannandrea, head of Artificial Intelligence, are rumoured to be considering retirement.

There were no huge declarations or tools at the WWDC25, just practical tweaks aimed at improving user experience.

From live call translation to on-device smart summaries, what Apple announced was measured and minimal. Siri didn’t get the overhaul many had expected after last year’s promises. 

Instead, Apple focused on more secure system integration and privacy-led enhancements, nothing that screamed innovation.

Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering, confirmed developers would now be able to access the on-device large language model embedded in Apple Intelligence. 

“We’re opening up access for any app to tap directly into the on-device, large language model at the core of Apple,” he said. That’s important for privacy, but not necessarily performance.

The on-device model itself is limited. It runs on about 3 billion parameters, small when compared to the power of cloud-based systems used by Microsoft or Google. It can’t process large, complex tasks, which means it is limited in areas where true generative AI is beginning to thrive.

Still, Apple’s strategy is to stay local, stay secure and features like call screening, where iPhones can pick up unknown calls, ask why the person is calling, and then transcribe the response before the phone even rings, are clever. 

So is the live call translation that doesn’t require the other caller to own an iPhone. It’s thoughtful tech, but hardly disruptive.

The redesigned operating systems, featuring what Apple calls a “liquid glass” aesthetic, are another example. It looks sleek, but it’s not revolutionary. It’s enabled by improved Apple silicon, and now all OS platforms, from iPhone to Mac, will adopt a consistent naming convention. The move to names instead of numbers is a way to streamline branding.

Image Playground, which now allows users to generate pictures using ChatGPT, was also showcased. Apple says user data won’t be shared with OpenAI unless the user consents. This cautious collaboration highlights how Apple is trying to balance innovation with its longstanding privacy-first ethos.

What’s missing from all of this is clarity on vision. A year ago, Apple spoke of intelligent agents and a new era of AI. That talk has all but disappeared. Analysts are taking note.

“In a moment in which the market questions Apple’s ability to take any sort of lead in the AI space, the announced features felt incremental at best,” said Thomas Monteiro, senior analyst at Investing.com. “It just seems that the clock is ticking faster every day for Apple.”

That ticking clock got louder as OpenAI, during Apple’s WWDC25 event, announced it had hit $10 billion in annualised revenue. One company accelerating into the AI future, the other inching forward.

Even within the developer community, there are questions. Apple’s Foundation Models Framework allows developers to plug into Apple Intelligence, but only the on-device version. The high-powered, cloud-backed models that could have taken these tools to the next level are staying behind closed doors.

Ben Bajarin, CEO of Creative Strategies, said: “You could see Apple’s priority is what they’re doing on the back-end, instead of what they’re doing at the front-end, which most people don’t really care about yet.”

Investors, it seems, agreed. Apple shares fell 1.2% by the end of the day, hardly a collapse, but a sign that the market wasn’t impressed.

If Apple is laying the foundation for bigger things, it’s doing so without noise. This is a deliberate approach we hope will pay off, not leave the company behind competitors.

He warns that if Apple integrates OpenAI at the OS level, Apple devices would be banned from his businesses, and visitors would have to check their Apple devices at the door, where they’ll be stored in a Faraday cage.

This, according to Elon Musk, is due to major issues surrounding privacy and security.

Apple announced that with iOS 18, Siri will utilize ChatGPT for handling complex queries. This integration allows users to ask Siri questions, and if ChatGPT can assist, it will ask for permission to share the query and provide an answer. 

Apple has assured that user data will only be shared with explicit consent and that interactions are designed to be secure. Again, user data shared with OpenAI will not be logged or stored.

Elon Musk took to his social media platform, X (formerly Twitter), noting his disapproval. He described the integration as an “unacceptable security violation” and threatened to ban Apple devices at Tesla, SpaceX, and other Musk-owned companies.

He suggested that OpenAI’s capabilities should remain within a dedicated app rather than being integrated at the operating system level. 

On the part of Elon Musk, this points to a deep mistrust of the integration, implying that OpenAI could potentially access personal and private data through this new system. Despite reassurances from Apple and OpenAI, Elon Musk remains unconvinced, highlighting what he sees as a fundamental privacy risk.

Apple has reiterated that user control and consent are at the core of the ChatGPT integration. According to Craig Federighi, Apple’s SVP of Software Engineering, users will be asked before any information is shared with ChatGPT. 

The integration will be rolled out to iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and macOS Sequoia later this year, available on iPhone Pro 15 models and devices using M1 or newer chips. OpenAI also reiterated that requests are not stored and users’ IP addresses are obscured. 

Privacy and security in the integration of third-party AI technologies into operating systems are a big concern. However, reports point to Elon Musk’s standpoint as being influenced by his interests in his own AI ventures, such as xAI’s Grok. 

Apple’s announcement includes additional integrations, such as using ChatGPT within writing tools to generate content like bedtime stories or images, which further expands OpenAI’s reach and utility within the Apple industry.