Apple Hires IBM’s Chip Guru to lead iPod, iPhone Engineering Teams

Wednesday, November 5, 2008, 4:47
Technology
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Cupertino-based Apple has confirmed Mark Papermaster as its senior vice president of Devices Hardware Engineering. Reporting to Apple CEO Steve Jobs, Papermaster will now lead Apple’s iPod & iPhone hardware engineering teams. Former vice president at IBM, Papermaster has 25 years of product and technology experience.

Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO, was quoted as saying, Mark is a seasoned leader and is going to be an excellent addition to our senior management team. Tony and Dani have each made important contributions to Apple over the past eight years. We’re sorry to see Dani go, and are looking forward to working with Tony in his new capacity.

Apple maintained that Tony Fadell, head honcho on the iPod Division, and his wife Danielle Lambert, VP of human resources at Apple, have begun shrinking their roles in the company as they spend most of the time with their young family. Fadell will continue work at Apple in the capacity an advisor to the CEO, whereas, Lambert will have to leave the company at this year end after a successor is positioned.

The move (Apple says) has been taken considering many points, first of all, iPods have now become mini PCs and devices as the Touch and the iPhone are sprinting homegrown hardware – essentially stripped-down ARM chips popularized by PDAs from the turn of the century – and having flash memory and communications chips for different suppliers. Next, there are issues about battery life and performance, which can only be attacked with intensity by a hardcore hardware guru like Mark Papermaster.

So, the main goal for hiring Papermaster is to let the chips flow and to guarantee that improvement and research is steady and prominently secret. This move has also disappointed IBM that delivered Apple’s architecture for years, and is now mainly out of the consumer hardware business excepting as secret makers of console chips.