Do the Apple executive team shuffle

It’s just a jump to the left, then a step to the right—look, we’ve got Time Machine and Time Capsule, so really it was only a matter of time before we ended up with the Time Warp too. But it’s the Apple executive team who are practicing their dance steps today with a couple of high profile changes.

The debonair Scott Forstall (left) is a lock to take the stage at the WWDC keynote, as he’s now been moved from the vice president of iPhone development to the senior vice president of iPhone software (he gets his picture on the executive board page and everything. Is it just me, or does he have kind of a Zach Braff-meets-Justin Long thing going on? Maybe it’s the hair.

Elsewhere, the executive team also adds Bob Mansfield (right) as senior vice president of Mac Hardware Engineering, the first person to hold that particular post since November of 2004. Unlike Forstall, who will report directly to Steve Jobs, Mansfield is directly responsible to Tim Cook. As long as we’re playing the celebrity lookalike game, I’m going to go ahead and say that he’s kind of channeling John C. Reilly.

So beside their spiffy new titles, what else do our contestants get? Glad you asked: their compensation package includes 25,000 restricted “Apple stock units”, due to vest on March 24th 2010 (for those keeping track at home, that’s the ninth birthday of OS X). At the time of the deal, that stock was worth over $4 million.

In other news: I got a rock.