And another one jumps ship. Alan Dye, who has led Apple’s UI design team since 2015, is leaving to join Meta as its chief design officer, Bloomberg ‘s Mark Guman reports.
Apple’s most prominent design exec is “a major coup that underscores a push by the social networking giant into AI-equipped consumer devices.” Dye will join Meta on December 31. The company is opening a design studio and him oversight of design for “hardware, software and AI integration for its interfaces,” Gurman says. Designer Steve Lemay will replace Dye at Apple, the company confirmed to him.
“Steve Lemay has played a key role in the design of every major Apple interface since 1999,” CEO Tim Cook told Bloomberg. “He has always set an extraordinarily high bar for excellence and embodies Apple’s culture of collaboration and creativity.” Following the recent retirement of former COO Jeff Williams, Apple’s design team now reports to Tim Cook.
By my count Dye is the eighth Apple exec to be lured away by Meta. Six are AI specialists: in addition to Dye, they’re Frank Chu, Ruoming Pang, Tom Gunter, Mark Lee, Bowen Zhang, and Yun Zhu.
And on October 15 it was announced that Ke Yang, who headed the Answers, Knowledge, and Information team, is leaving for Apple His replacement hasn’t yet been announced.
Dye joined Apple’s marketing and communication team as a creative director in 2006. He transitioned to Jony Ive’s user interface team in 2012 to work on iOS 7, and he worked on subsequent iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS, and visionOS design updates. Most recently, he helped develop the Vision Pro interface, and he oversaw the rollout of the iOS 26 and macOS 26 Liquid Glass design revamp.
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