Katherine L. Adams

Board of directors

As of September 1, 2026, the board of directors of Apple includes:

Tim Cook (executive chairman)

Arthur Levinson (lead independent director)

John Ternus (CEO)

Wanda Austin

Alex Gorsky

Andrea Jung

Monica Lozano

Ronald Sugar

Susan Wagner

Previous CEOs

Michael Scott (1977–1981)

Mike Markkula (1981–1983)

John Sculley (1983–1993)

Michael Spindler (1993–1996)

Gil Amelio (1996–1997)

Steve Jobs (1997–2011)

Tim Cook (2011–2026)

Previous chairmen

Mike Markkula (1977–1981)

Steve Jobs (1981–1985)

Mike Markkula (1985–1993)

John Sculley (1993)

Mike Markkula (1993–1996)

Gil Amelio (1996–1997)

Steve Jobs (2011)

Arthur Levinson (2011–2026)

Corporate culture

Apple is one of several highly successful companies founded in the 1970s that bucked the traditional notions of corporate culture. Jobs often walked around the office barefoot even after Apple became a Fortune 500 company. By the time of the "1984" television advertisement, Apple's informal culture had become a key trait that differentiated it from its competitors. According to a 2011 report in Fortune, this has resulted in a corporate culture more akin to a startup rather than a multinational corporation. In a 2017 interview, Wozniak credited watching Star Trek and attending Star Trek conventions in his youth as inspiration for co-founding Apple.

As the company has grown and been led by a series of differently opinionated chief executives, some media have suggested that it has lost some of its original character. Nonetheless, it has maintained a reputation for fostering individuality and excellence that reliably attracts talented workers, particularly after Jobs returned. Numerous Apple employees have stated that projects without Jobs' involvement often took longer than others.

The Apple Fellows program awards employees for extraordinary technical or leadership contributions to personal computing. Recipients include Bill Atkinson, Steve Capps, Rod Holt, Alan Kay, Guy Kawasaki, Al Alcorn, Don Norman, Rich Page, Steve Wozniak, and Phil Schiller.

Jobs intended that employees were to be specialists who are not exposed to functions outside their area of expertise. For instance, Ron Johnson—Senior Vice President of Retail Operations until November 1, 2011—was responsible for site selection, in-store service, and store layout, yet had no control of the inventory in his stores. This was done by Tim Cook, who had a background in supply-chain management. Apple is known for strictly enforcing accountability. Each project has a "directly responsible individual" or "DRI" in Apple jargon. Unlike other major US companies, Apple provides a relatively simple compensation policy for executives that does not include perks enjoyed by other CEOs like country club fees or private use of company aircraft. The company typically grants stock options to executives every other year.

In 2015, Apple had 110,000 full-time employees. This increased to 116,000 full-time employees the next year, a notable hiring decrease, largely due to its first revenue decline. Apple does not specify how many of its employees work in retail, though its 2014 SEC filing put the number at approximately half of its employee base. In September 2017, Apple announced that it had over 123,000 full-time employees.

Apple has a strong culture of corporate secrecy, and has an anti-leak Global Security team that recruits from the National Security Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the United States Secret Service. In December 2017, Glassdoor said Apple was the 48th best place to work, having originally entered at rank 19 in 2009, peaking at rank 10 in 2012, and falling down the ranks in subsequent years. In 2023, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman revealed the existence of Apple's Exploratory Design Group (XDG), which was working to add glucose monitoring to the Apple Watch. Gurman compared XDG to Alphabet's X "moonshot factory".

Offices

Apple's headquarters are located at Apple Park in Cupertino, in the center of Silicon Valley. Opened in 2017, the circular groundscraper houses more than 12,000 employees. Apple co-founder Steve Jobs envisioned the campus as resembling a nature preserve rather than a conventional office park, and presented the proposal to the Cupertino City Council in June 2011 during his final public appearance before his death.

Apple also operates the Infinite Loop campus, approximately 1 mile (1.6 km) west of Apple Park. Opened in 1993 as a research and development campus, it served as Apple's headquarters from 1997 until the opening of Apple Park in 2017 and continues to house offices and laboratories.

In nearby Sunnyvale, California, Apple occupies the Wolfe campus, which was completed in 2018 after the company acquired the office development during construction.

In addition to these campuses, Apple occupies numerous office and research buildings throughout Cupertino and Sunnyvale, including the former headquarters buildings Stephens Creek 3 (1977–1978) and Mariani 1 (1982–1993).

Apple's headquarters for Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) are located in Cork in the south of Ireland, called the Hollyhill campus. The facility, which opened in 1980, houses 5,500 people and was Apple's first location outside of the United States. Apple's international sales and distribution arms operate out of the campus in Cork.

Apple has two campuses near Austin, Texas: a 216,000-square-foot (20,100 m2) campus opened in 2014 houses 500 engineers who work on Apple silicon and a 1.1-million-square-foot (100,000 m2) campus opened in 2021 where 6,000 people work in technical support, supply chain management, online store curation, and Apple Maps data management. The company also has several other major locations in Boulder, Colorado, Culver City, California, Elk Grove, California, Herzliya, London, Los Angeles, Munich, San Diego, Seattle, and Shanghai that each employ hundreds of people.