Apple design lead Alan Dye is heading to Meta

Alan Dye, Apple’s Vice President of Human Interface Design, has been poached by Meta, Bloomberg reports. The designer performed a pivotal function in the feel and appear of Apple’s merchandise since Jony Ive left the company in 2019, and now he’ll be taking his skills to Meta.

Dye will reportedly work beneath Chief Know-how Officer Andrew Bosworth as the pinnacle of a brand new studio that can oversee the design of {hardware}, software program and AI merchandise. The studio may even embody former Apple designer Billy Sorrentino, Meta’s interface design lead Joshua To, an industrial design crew led by Pete Bristol, and metaverse design and artwork groups led by Jason Rubin, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on Threads.

“The brand new studio will carry collectively design, trend, and expertise to outline the subsequent era of our merchandise and experiences,” Zuckerberg shared within the submit. “Our thought is to deal with intelligence as a brand new design materials and picture what turns into doable when it’s plentiful, succesful and human-centered.”

Apple, in the meantime, is changing Dye with Stephen Lemay, Bloomberg reviews, a senior designer on the firm who’s labored on all the firm’s interfaces since 1999. Contemplating the secrecy of Apple as an organization, it is laborious to credit score particular person breakthroughs to particular person designers, however Dye labored on a number of of Apple’s main new platforms and design modifications, together with issues just like the interface of visionOS and its new Liquid Glass design language.

Meta has had success with its Quest virtual reality headsets and extra just lately, its Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, however the firm clearly hopes to launch many extra shopper {hardware} merchandise with Dye and its new design studio’s assist. These will doubtless embody future variations of the Meta Ray-Ban Display and its Neural Band accent.

Dye is not the primary designer Apple has misplaced to a competitor. Evans Hankey, the corporate’s former head of commercial design, left Apple in 2022 to work with Ive. Hankey is now one in all a number of former Apple staff constructing OpenAI’s upcoming hardware device. Dye becoming a member of Meta is especially attention-grabbing on this case as a result of Apple is rumored to be engaged on merchandise that can carry the corporate in even nearer competitors to the social media large. The Imaginative and prescient Professional may very well be thought-about to be a high-end competitor in VR, however Apple is reportedly engaged on its own pair of smart glasses, too.

Replace, December 3, 5:54PM ET: Added data from Mark Zuckerberg’s Threads submit on hiring Alan Dye and Meta’s new design studio.