After Steve Jobs: Apple's next CEO

Fresh questions about Jobs' health rekindle an old dilemma for Apple: If he were to leave (for any reason), who could possibly fill his shoes? Here are 11 potential successors - roughly in order of their chances.

Timothy D. Cook
A 12-year veteran of IBM and Compaq, Cook probably has more direct line responsibility that anyone in the company — even Jobs. Not only is he head of the resurgent Mac division, but he's responsible, as his official bio puts it, “for all of the company's worldwide sales and operations, including end-to-end management of Apple's supply chain, sales activities, and service and support in all markets and countries.” Cook's deep knowledge of Apple's operations and ready command of detail has won him the respect of the board of directors and the investment community. A bachelor with a passion for cycling, he's as steady and low-key as Jobs is temperamental. Although some wonder whether Cook has enough charisma to run Apple, when Jobs was out of commission following cancer surgery four years ago, Cook was the executive Jobs put in charge.

Tony Fadell
Title: Senior vice president, iPod division

With his American swagger and his hair bleached white, Fadell stood out at button-down Philips Electronics, where he led an in-house pirate operation designing Windows CE-based devices. It was there that he came up with the idea of marrying a Napster-like music store with a hard drive-based MP3 player. He shopped the concept around the Valley before Apple's Jon Rubenstein snapped it up and put Fadell in charge of the engineering team that built the first iPod. Now he runs the hardware division that makes two of Apple's three key product lines: the iPod and the iPhone. Ambitious and charismatic (and no longer a bleached blond), “Fadell is the man if SJ gets to pick (his successor),” says 9to5Mac's Cleve Nettles.

Ron Johnson
Title: Senior vice president, retail
Johnson was a retailing star at Target before he came to Apple in 2000, and he's an even bigger star today, having designed what is arguably the world's most user-friendly chain of retail stores. He shares Jobs' single-minded focus on the customer experience, and when he parts ways with Jobs — the Genius Bar, where customers get hands-on troubleshooting, was a Johnson idea that Jobs resisted — he is often right. Most retailers focus on how you find the right item, he says, how you select it and how you get it out of the store. “We said there's a bigger idea. Let's design it around the customer's life, not the moment when they're in the store.” Apple's second-most charismatic public speaker, he is on several outsiders' short list of possible successors.

Philip W. Schiller
Title: Senior vice president, worldwide product marketing
An avuncular, unthreatening presence, Schiller plays a slightly rotund Sancho Panza to Jobs' Quixote at nearly every Apple event. His deer-in-the-headlight performance — caught on videotape — when ambushed by a British TV reporter at the London unveiling of the iPhone contributed to the sense that Apple would be in trouble if Jobs were ever to leave. But it would be a mistake to underestimate Schiller. He has 24 years of marketing experience — 17 of them at Apple — and his official bio credits him with delivering a long list of “breakthrough” products: iMac, MacBook, Airport, Xserve, Mac OS X, Safari, AppleTV, iPod and iPhone.

Scott Forstall
Title: Senior vice president, iPhone software
A veteran of NeXT, where he helped build the operating system that became OS X, Forstall came to Apple with Jobs in 1997. After proving himself by managing the team that released OS X Leopard, he was put in charge of software for the iPhone. “I actually have a photographer's loupe that I use to make sure every pixel is right,” he told Time. “We will argue over literally a single pixel.” His profile was raised by public appearances at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in 2006 and the March '08 SDK announcement. In an executive shakeup three days before WWDC 2008, he was elevated to senior vice president, reporting directly to Jobs.

Jonathan Ive
Title: Senior vice president, industrial design
Although his name is often floated as the next Apple CEO — and despite the fact that he garnered 49% of the votes in a recent online poll that asked “who would you trust to run Apple, without Jobs?” — Ive is probably the least likely of the leading contenders to take the job. Modest and notoriously shy (when he won the 2005 Design and Art Direction award it was Jobs who made the acceptance speech, although Ive was in the audience), he guards his privacy jealously; even Apple's HR department doesn't know exactly when he was born. Ive is perhaps the most influential industrial designer of our age. Why would he give up a job he clearly loves to take on the responsibilities of a CEO?

Peter Oppenheimer
Title: Chief financial officer

A long-time Apple senior exec — he joined the company in 1996 after a six years at Coopers & Lybrand and a sojourn at ADP, where he was CFO of the claims services division — he has the job formerly held by Fred Anderson (the ex-Apple CFO thrown under the bus in the options backdating scandal). Oppenheimer's is a familiar voice to analysts and tech journalists. He turns up every three months on the company's quarterly earnings call to rattle off Apple's sales and revenue numbers and to offer his traditionally conservative guidance for the coming quarter. He took a lot of heat from shareholders in January when guidance even more pessimistic than usual sent the stock into a one-day 16-point nosedive.

Bertrand Serlet
Title: Senior vice president, software engineering

One of only two nonnative-born Americans on Apple's executive team — Fake Steve Jobs calls him a “friendly cyborg” from another planet, but he's actually from France — Serlet came to Apple from Xerox PARC and NeXT, where he developed the workspace manager in NEXTSTEP and OPENSTEP. Having help port the NeXT operating system to Mac OS X, he took over Avie Tevanian's software engineering post in 2003. Serlet is credited with leading development of 10.4 and 10.5 versions of OS X, but he's most famous among Apple fans for his “Redmond, start your copiers” performance at WWDC 2006 — available on YouTube — pointing out similarities between OS X and Windows Vista.

Sina Tamaddon
Title: Senior vice president, applications

The other non-native member of the team (he's Iranian), and yet another veteran of NeXT, he came to Apple with Jobs' return in September 1997. Although he's held several top positions at Apple — including vice president and general manager of the Newton Group — and reports directly to Jobs, Tamaddon probably has a lower profile than anybody else on the executive team. He's the only member without an bio on Apple's official web page, and as this went to press, the question “Where did Sina Tamaddon go to school” had still not elicited any replies on WikiAnswers.

Daniel Cooperman
Title: Senior vice president, general counsel and secretary

A relative newcomer, Cooperman joined Apple in November 2007 as the last move in a series of legal musical chairs (he left Oracle for Apple as Donald Rosenburg was leaving Apple for Qualcomm; Rosenberg had replaced Nancy Heinen, who is fighting SEC charges in the backdating case). Jobs began recruiting Cooperman last August after getting the okay from his friend Larry Ellison, according to Law.com, sweetening the pot with restricted stock worth $25 million. “The switcheroo was Larry's idea,” wrote Fake Steve Jobs last September, when the move was announced. “Now that the feds are circling again he says I need some bad-ass mofo leading my team, not some namby-pamby Valley type. 'I want you to have my consigliere,' he told me. 'He's a good man. He can be trusted. Listen to him.'”

Bob Mansfield
Title: Senior vice president, Mac hardware engineering

Mansfield has an important job: he heads the team that has delivered “dozens of breakthrough products,” according to his official bio, from the iMac to the Macbook Air. But he didn't actually head the team when most of those breakthroughs were made. After stints at two companies specializing in 3D graphics chips, SGI and Raycer Graphics, he came to Cupertino in 1999 when Apple acquired Raycer. He was part of the troika that took over Mac engineering after the messy dismissal of Tim Bucher in 2004 and was formally put in charge of the division only last month. Unlike most senior VPs at Apple, he answers to Tim Cook, not Steve Jobs.