Apple senior executives reshuffled

Apple has revealed a major management shuffle by naming Tim Cook its chief operating officer, and announcing the retirement of Jon Rubinstein.

Cook has been Apple's executive vice president of worldwide sales and operations since 2002. He will continue to report to Apple CEO Steve Jobs. He will be responsible for Apple's worldwide sales and operations, and will continue to lead the company's Mac Division. He will also work closely with Jobs and senior executives to lead Apple's business.

Farewell, Rubinstein

Apple also announced that Jon Rubinstein, Apple's senior vice president of the iPod Division will retire on March 31 and be succeeded by Tony Fadell. Fadell will report to Steve Jobs and take over all aspects of iPod engineering. Fadell is known as the "father of the iPod," because he bought the concept of the product to Apple.

On the departure of Rubinstein and the promotion of Fadell, Jobs said: "I've worked with Jon for over 15 years, and we're going to miss him. Jon has done an excellent job as a member of Apple's senior management team, as well as building our world-class iPod engineering team and running our hardware engineering team prior to that.

"Tony has been doing a superb job running a large part of the iPod engineering team, and we're expecting a very smooth transition."

Fadell joined Apple's iPod Engineering team in 2001 and was promoted to vice president of iPod engineering in 2004. Prior to joining Apple, Fadell worked at Philips Electronics.

Apple's quiet man takes control

Cook's promotion also raised comment from the boss: "Tim has been doing this job for over two years now, and it's high time we officially recognized it with this promotion. Tim and I have worked together for over seven years now, and I am looking forward to working even more closely with him to help Apple reach some exciting goals during the coming years."

Cook joined Apple in 1998 as senior vice president of operations, and was promoted to executive vice president of worldwide sales and operations in 2002. His responsibilities were expanded to include leading Apple's Mac Division in 2004. Before joining Apple, Cook was a vice president at Compaq and also spent 12 years with IBM.