Apple announces departure of both general counsel and environmental chief

The revolving door at Apple Park isn’t done spinning yet. In the wake of the announcements this week of departures for both AI chief John Giannandrea and design leader Alan Dye, Apple said on Thursday that its general counsel, Katherine Adams, and vice president of Environment, Policy and Social Initiatives Lisa Jackson, would both be stepping down next year.

The two will be replaced by a single executive: Jennifer Newstead, who most recently served as Meta’s chief legal officer.1

Jackson will retire in late January, at which point Adams will become both general counsel and head of Government Affairs; that organization will transition to Newstead in March 2026.

Such a move isn’t unprecedented: for example, Deirdre O’Brien became the head of both Apple’s People group and the Retail division after the departure of Angela Ahrendts in 2019.

However, a couple of details do stand out to me. Prior to her stint at Meta, Newstead was the legal adviser to the U.S. Department of State during part of Trump’s first term in the White House. She also previously worked in the White House as Associate Counsel in the George W. Bush administration, and subsequently served as General Counsel of the Office of Management and Budget.

That’s quite a change from Jackson, who headed up the Environmental Protection Agency during President Obama’s time in office and was specifically brought in to handle the company’s environmental efforts. But given the relationship Apple has been navigating with the current president, it’s perhaps not entirely surprising that the wind has shifted.

Also, Newstead will not head up environmental and social initiatives—those will instead transfer to newly installed chief operating officer Sabih Khan, who also picked up some new responsibilities in Giannandrea’s departure. Safe to say he’s going to be very busy; it does suggest that Apple considers its environmental affairs part of its operations pipeline.

Over all this continues to hover uncertainty about Tim Cook’s future, with some recent reports suggesting that he might announce his retirement sometime next year, though it’s more than possible that he might simply transition into the company’s chairman role. If nothing else, a long era of stability amongst Apple’s leadership has seen a lot of changes recently, and it may not be over yet.

A previous version of this article suggested that environmental and social initiatives would be subsumed by Government Affairs; updated to clarify that they have moved instead to Khan.

Dye, of course, left to head up Meta’s design studio, which gives all this the feeling of a big name sports trade. ↩