By Graham K. Rogers

Perhaps signifying some changes behind the scenes, a number of appointments and personnel shifts at the higher management levels of Apple have been announced.

Promoted to the role of COO, a position Tim Cook once held, is the highly respected Jeff Williams, who was SVP of operations. Phil Schiller who is Senior Vice-President for Marketing, now also has responsibility for the App Store, which had been the domain of Eddy Cue, who is still shown on the Executive profiles page as Senior Vice President Internet Software and Services

Added to the mix is Johny Srouji, previously responsible for chip engineering, who is now Senior Vice President Hardware Technologies. Apple also announced that Tor Myhren will join Apple in 2016 as Vice President of Marketing Communications. He is currently Worldwide Chief Creative Officer of Grey (Adweek's 2013 and 2015 Global Agency of the Year), and President of Grey New York.

In the press release about the new appointments, Tim Cook said,

"We are fortunate to have incredible depth and breadth of talent across Apple's executive team. As we come to the end of the year, we're recognizing the contributions already being made by two key executives. . . Jeff is hands-down the best operations executive I've ever worked with, and Johny's team delivers world-class silicon designs which enable new innovations in our products year after year."

Cook continued, "In addition, Phil is taking on new responsibilities for advancing our ecosystem, led by the App Store, which has grown from a single, groundbreaking iOS store into four powerful platforms and an increasingly important part of our business. And I'm incredibly happy to welcome Tor Myhren, who will bring his creative talents to our advertising and marcom functions."

More information is available in the Apple Press Release, and in the Executive Profiles page.

Graham K. Rogers teaches at the Faculty of Engineering, Mahidol University in Thailand. He wrote in the Bangkok Post, Database supplement on IT subjects. For the last seven years of Database he wrote a column on Apple and Macs. He is now continuing that in the Bangkok Post supplement, Life.