In what is a continuation of a sordid saga, one that involves OpenAI and its proverbial halls rapidly filling up to the brim with talent poached from Apple outright, the head of Apple's Vision Products Group is now departing for supposedly greener pastures over at OpenAI, leaving behind an Apple product category that is hopelessly falling behind its peers.
It's a tale as old as OpenAI itself: Apple's talent lured to lay the foundations of future growth avenues over at OpenAI
According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, Paul Meade, who is Apple's VP of hardware engineering at its Vision Products Group, overseeing the Vision Pro as well as Apple's upcoming smart glasses gambit, is now leaving for a stint at OpenAI.
According to Gurman, Meade will end his 15-year tenure at Apple next week, going on to work within OpenAI's hardware unit that is laser-focused on bringing a number of consumer-oriented AI devices to the market.
As we noted recently, OpenAI has been working on a number of AI devices, including AI-powered earbuds that bear the internal codename "Sweetpea" but might retail under the "Dime" brand name, and a consumer device that is shaped like a pen and bears the internal codename "Gumdrop."
Even so, the famous Apple-centric analyst, Ming-Chi Kuo, disclosed back in April that OpenAI has relegated its planned range of consumer devices to the proverbial cryo unit for now, focusing its efforts instead on an AI-powered smartphone.
According to Kuo, Luxshare is likely to serve as the key assembler of OpenAI's smartphone that appears poised to challenge the dominance of the Apple iPhone, going on to note that OpenAI appears to have settled on a customized version of MediaTek's upcoming Dimensity 9600 chip as the SoC of choice for its planned smartphone.
For the benefit of those who might not be aware, the Dimensity 9600 chip will leverage TSMC's N2P node. Moreover, the Pro version is expected to sport 2x ARM C2-Ultra cores (clocked at around 5GHz), 3x ARM C2-Premium cores, and 3x ARM C2-Pro cores, emulating the 2+3+3 CPU architecture of Qualcomm's upcoming Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 chip.
Meanwhile, Apple's Vision Pro has largely failed to gain mainstream traction, while its smart glasses won't launch until late 2027, with AR glasses pushed back till 2028 or even 2029. It is hardly a surprise, therefore, that Meade has chosen to leave Apple at this juncture.
Of course, Meade is not alone in opting to depart Apple over the past few months. Back in January 2026, Apple lost a key Siri executive, Stuart Bowers, to Google's DeepMind.
Apple also lost four key executives in December 2025, including the then-AI czar, John Ginnandrea, and the head of UI design, Alan Dye.
Of course, Apple's core iPhone design team has also been bleeding talent to Jony Ive's io, which was recently acquired by OpenAI in its quest for an "iPhone Killer" device. Gurman reported back in 2025 that OpenAI had hired as many as 40 Apple engineers, including Matt Theobald, a manufacturing design expert, and Cyrus Daniel Irani, the lead on human interface design
To counter OpenAI's siren call, Apple recently increased the bonus for its key design team members, who now stand to earn between $200,000 and $400,000 in annual bonuses, depending on how Apple's stock performs.
About the author: Writing is my one incontrovertible passion. Over the past six years, he has authored over 2,200 distinct articles on financial and tech-related topics, spanning nearly 1 million words. And he has been a member of Wcctech mobile team since 2025. As an alumnus of the University of Toronto, Rotman Commerce Program, I bring nuance, in-depth knowledge, and a unique perspective to every topic that I cover. When I'm not writing, I'm traveling the world, exploring hidden confectionaries and restaurants as an aspiring food connoisseur.
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