Apple Design Chief Alan Dye Departs for Meta in Major Talent Shift Alan Dye, the Apple Vice President of Human Interface Design, has been hired away by Meta, according to a report. Dye had been a central figure in shaping the aesthetic and user experience of Apple products following the departure of legendary designer Jony Ive in 2019. At Meta, Dye will report to Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth and lead a newly formed studio. This studio will be responsible for the design of hardware, software, and AI products. The team will include other notable designers such as former Apple designer Billy Sorrentino and Meta’s interface design lead Joshua To. It will also encompass industrial design, metaverse design, and art teams. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the hire and the new studio in a post, stating the group will bring together design, fashion, and technology to define the next generation of the company’s products. He added that the studio’s philosophy will be to treat intelligence as a new design material, imagining what is possible when it is abundant, capable, and human-centered. To fill the void left by Dye, Apple is promoting Stephen Lemay, a senior designer with a long history at the company dating back to 1999. While Apple’s secretive culture makes it difficult to attribute specific innovations to individuals, Dye was involved in several major projects. These included the development of the visionOS interface for the Vision Pro headset and the company’s recent Liquid Glass design language. Meta has found success in consumer hardware with its Quest line of virtual reality headsets and, more recently, its Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses. The recruitment of Dye and the establishment of the new studio signal a clear ambition to expand and refine its portfolio of consumer devices. Future products likely to benefit from this design focus include new versions of the Meta Ray-Ban Display smart glasses and the Neural Band accessory. This is not the first time Apple has lost a top designer to a competitor. Evans Hankey, Apple’s former head of industrial design, left in 2022 and is now among several ex-Apple employees working on an upcoming hardware device for OpenAI. Dye’s move to Meta is particularly noteworthy as it comes at a time when the two tech giants are increasingly on a collision course. While Apple’s Vision Pro is a high-end competitor in the spatial computing space, Apple is also rumored to be developing its own pair of smart glasses, which would place it in more direct competition with Meta’s wearable efforts. The poaching of a key design executive underscores the intensifying battle for talent and market leadership in the next generation of personal technology and AI-driven interfaces.
