Apple CEO Tim Cook might start to notice a few empty chairs around his boardroom table shortly, as executives drop like flies from the world's richest tech company.

In the last 24 months - with a rapid acceleration in the last six months - Apple has lost more than a handful of its senior leadership talent.

Carol Surface, Chief People Officer

Jeff Williams, Chief Operating Officer

Dan Riccio, SVP, Hardware Engineering

John Giannandrea, SVP, Machine Learning and AI Strategy

Lisa Jackson, SVP, Environment, Policy and Social Initiatives

Steve Dowling, SVP, Communications

Katherine Adams, SVP, Legal and Global Security

Those are some heavy hitters to lose all at once. Considering Apple is a company that prides itself on hardware design, security, environmental leadership and how it locks itself down to keep all communications tight as a drum, losing all the folks responsible for those activities is a bad beat.

Similarly, compared to its competitors like Google and Meta, Apple is currently struggling on its mission to bring AI to the forefront of its customer experience. The loss of its head of AI isn't going to make matters easier for the company, then.

These departures are backlit by the tenure of its CEO, Tim Cook. Cook, who succeeded Steve Jobs after his death in 2011, is reportedly considering hanging it up in 2026 to make way for a new man at the top in 2026.

It's now being reported that Apple's head of chips is set to depart to "continue his career elsewhere".

To give you an idea of his significance at the tech giant, Apple is currently sitting pretty thanks to its A-series and M-series chips. The latter series of chips currently powers its laptops and a few iPads. The company ditched Intel chips in favour of its own design, and it put Apple generations-ahead of the competition.

While the brain drain at the top is yet to show up in the share price, it might be an alarm bell for investors going into 2026.