It appears to be a free-for-all season at Apple, with executives and key talent being poached by Meta, OpenAI, and others in what appears to be a seemingly endless parade of high-profile departures.
Apple's head of user interface design team, Alan Dye, is departing for a lucrative stint at Meta
As per the news that is just breaking across the proverbial airwaves, the head of Apple's user interface design team, Alan Dye, has been officially poached by Mark Zuckerberg's Meta. Dye's vacant seat will now be filled by another in-house UI designer at Apple, Stephen Lemay.
Dye had been a part of Apple's UI design team since 2015, having overseen some of Apple's most iconic design choices in recent memory, including the iPhone X, the watchOS, the pill-shaped Dynamic Island on the recent iPhones, iOS 26 and its Liquid Glass effect, and the Vision Pro's dedicated interface that facilitates spatial interactions.
Earlier this week, the iPhone manufacturer tossed its AI czar, John Giannandrea, to the curb for Microsoft's AI researcher, Amar Subramanya, who will now lead Apple's AI efforts as a VP under Craig Federighi.
This comes as Abidur Chowdhury, the designer of the iPhone Air and a rising star within Apple, has also left his cushy job with the Cupertino giant to pursue a stint at an unnamed AI startup.
The Cupertino giant's core iPhone design team is also bleeding talent to Jony Ive's io, which was recently acquired by OpenAI in its quest for an "iPhone Killer" device, to be packaged in a screenless, pocket-sized form factor.
According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, OpenAI has hired around 40 Apple engineers in the last month or so alone! Some of these prominent hires from Apple include Matt Theobald, a manufacturing design expert, and Cyrus Daniel Irani, the lead on human interface design.
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