Described as 'changing of the guard'

The departure of Bertrand Serlet from Apple is being done on good terms, sources claim. Until today, Serlet was the company's senior VP of Mac software engineering. Officially the executive has said he is leaving to "focus less on products and more on science;" in any case he is just moving on, the sources contend. "There’s no acrimony there," one of the sources explains, describing the transition as simply a "changing of the guard."

Some early speculation had held that Serlet's exit might be related to a shift in focus at Apple. The iPhone alone now generates more money than Macs, and the upcoming Mac OS X Lion borrows some interface elements directly from the iPad. The sources say, though, that no confrontation over Apple's direction was involved in Serlet's decision to go.

A former Apple engineer tangentially mentions that Serlet's name can be found in a lot of the internal Apple code for Mac OS X unseen by the public. Among his contributions are code in malloc.c, the first implementation of NSObject, and different parts of CoreFoundation. "Avi Tevanian often gets credit for the work that he did on Mach, but Bertrand was most of the brains behind Cocoa," the person says.

by MacNN Staff