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Apple today announced that it has promoted Craig Federighi and Dan Riccio from vice presidents to senior vice presidents. Federighi fills the role vacated by Bertrand Serlet as senior VP of Mac software engineering while Riccio takes over from Bob Mansfield as senior VP of hardware engineering who announced his resignation in June. Riccio’s appointment follows the June announcement in which he was already named as Mansfield’s successor.

An interesting outcome of this is that Apple as of today has two senior VPs of hardware engineering because Mansfield has yet to retire from his position despite taking on a new role to develop future products. The move is slightly reminiscent of when Tony Fadell resigned as senior VP of iPod division and taking on a role as Steve Jobs’ advisor back in 2008 but at that time, Fadell did not retain his position on Apple’s executive team, whereas Mansfield today is still there.

There are many ways to look at this transition but what seems apparent is that Mansfield’s daily roles have been reassigned to Riccio while he focuses on finishing Apple’s immediate upcoming products, after which he will leave Apple and retire properly (or move on to another company). Or perhaps he will continue at Apple developing future products the way Lucius Fox secretly handles Bruce Wayne’s Bat equipments.