[xenadu02]

Perhaps you're reading too much into things?

Chris Lattner has been at Apple for over 11 years. He shepherded LLVM, Clang, lldb, and Swift. All while climbing the ranks to Director. A huge number of engineers would simply be ready to think about and do something different after that much time.

You might say that Elon answers "Why Tesla?" but in no way can you claim an answer to "Why leave Apple?".

(I have no inside knowledge, I've just been in the industry long enough to have gone through this myself).

[sulam]

Apple is famous for having some of the most tenured employees in the valley. 11 years is good, but not particularly long there. Google will be the next Apple in this regard, I predict.

[CamperBob2]

... in no way can you claim an answer to "Why leave Apple?".

Seems obvious, doesn't it? Nothing interesting going on.

Under Jobs, terms like "courage" and "innovation" used to mean something, like kicking sand in the face of the entire mobile phone industry and competing against their own bestselling product. Tim Cook's idea of "courage" involves selecting a headphone jack in a CAD tool and hitting the Delete key. And "innovation" means late nights at the office pushing the limits of dongle engineering.

[webjprgm]

My guess is that Apple was a vehicle to further his compiler and programming language plans. Now that he has done that, it becomes more mundane maintenance and incremental changes. So it is time to move on to a new challenge.

[rimantas]

Apple still has the best CPU on mobile. But that does not count for those who cannot see past a headphone jack.