Meet Craig Federighi, The Man Behind OS X And iOS

Both iOS 7 and OS X Maverick are here, and either you loved them or not, we can’t do anything, so you will have to accept it. And the whole team looked confident. Every executive that took the stage did a great job—particularly the relatively unknown Craig Federighi. Apple’s newly-appointed head of software seemed to be a crowd favorite as he introduced everyone to the future of OS X and iOS…

Craig Federighi works at Apple as Senior Vice President of Software Engineering, and he oversees both the OS X and iOS teams. He took over the position last fall, as part of Apple’s executive shakeup that saw Scott Forstall ousted and Jony Ive made head of human interaction.

Craig looked veteran on stage during Apple’s keynote, cracking jokes about Apple’s previous design follies and demonstrating some impressive new features from the company’s new desktop and mobile OSes. In fact, The Wall Street Journal calls him ‘Apple’s rising star.’

“A new frontman for Apple Inc. AAPL -0.29% is emerging. At the company’s annual developers conference Monday, little-known executive Craig Federighi got the most airtime during the keynote—and strong reviews.
With the spotlight came an important task for the senior vice president of software engineering: maintaining the loyalty of developers and impressing technology insiders with Apple’s latest software and designs.”

Craig has a long history with the iPhone maker. It started when he began working at NeXT, Steve Jobs’ other computer company, back in the early 90′s.

In fact, he worked right alongside Scott Forstall. Craig worked on databases, while Forstall worked on consumer software. And they moved to Apple together when it acquired NeXT in 1997. He left soon after the transfer, but returned in 2009 to head up the OS X team.