Kevin Lynch is one of the more interesting hires Apple made in the last decade. Back when the iPad came out in 2010, Steve Jobs was scathing in his remarks about Adobe Flash. At the time Kevin Lynch was the Chief Technical Officer at Adobe. Steve Jobs and Apple never put Flash on iOS and instead pushed for HTML5 which marked the slow demise of the web video format of the 2000s last year. Soon after Lynch after duelling personally with the Apple founder found himself at the company he was arguing with as they began the development of the Apple Watch. In fact, in 2014, when Tim Cook unveiled the Apple Watch for the first time, it was Kevin Lynch who showed off how it worked. And it has been the same way ever since. But now things are changing.
Kevin Lynch is the latest addition to the ever-growing Apple Car team -- led by John Giannandrea, Apple's senior Vice President of AI and machine learning strategy. Giannandrea himself got charge of the Apple Car dubbed Project Titan internally last December as longtime Apple executive Bob Mansfield went into permanent retirement after being brought out of it to run the project.
Lynch serves as VP for technology with the Apple Watch and Health team that reports to Jeff Williams, the chief operating officer of Apple. Williams is of course number two at Apple taking over the role that his boss Tim Cook once held at the time Steve Jobs was the CEO. When Lynch joined Apple he reported to Mansfield who was at the time working on the Apple Watch.
Lynch was the chief technology officer at Adobe before he became VP of technology at Apple
Lynch is handing many of his responsibilities to Evan Doll who is Apple's director of healthcare software. Interestingly, Lynch is Doll's boss but he will be more or less replaced by Doll as Lynch dedicates time towards Project Titan. Lynch basically is responsible for the software platform that powers the Apple Watch called watchOS.
Apple even hired Ulrich Kranz who is the co-founder of Canoo and had earlier worked at BMW as a VP designing its electric cars. Apple even considered acquiring Canoo but it wanted to stay independent, but it hired Kranz instead. It will be interesting to see how Lynch slots in as day to day operations of the project are led by Doug Fields who is also a VP so it is unlikely that Lynch will start reporting into Fields but may work parallel to him helping out on the self-driving and AI aspect of the car which sits well with his background.
It is also kind of poetic and ironic that Lynch was the man who took on the mighty Steve Jobs and then became one of the fathers of the Apple Watch which has been Apple's only major new product since the death of its iconic co-founder. And now he will do it again, as Jobs often expressed a desire to have Apple build a car.
