Born in Germany, and a long-time Apple employee who rose through the ranks in Apple's European operations, Spindler was chosen to take over when John Sculley was ousted by Apple's board of directors in June 1993.
Spindler presided over several successful projects, such as the introduction of the PowerPC, as well as some less successful, including the Newton and the Copland operating system. He also engaged in takeover discussions with IBM, Sun Microsystems and Philips, but when these went nowhere, he was in turn replaced by Gil Amelio, on February 2, 1996.