Apple’s Vice President of Human Interface Design, Alan Dye, is reported to be leaving the company to join Meta as their Chief Design Officer.

Juli Clover, writing at MacRumors.com:

Dye is joining Meta as chief design officer on December 31, and he will help Meta in its efforts to further break into consumer hardware. Dye will head up Meta’s new design studio, overseeing hardware design and software design with a focus on improving Meta devices like headsets and glasses with AI features.

According to the aforementioned MacRumors article (which is based on a Bloomberg article by Marc Gurman), Dye will be replaced by Stephen Lemay, who has been a member of Apple’s design team for over two decades.

The news of Dye’s departure comes just days after Apple announced the upcoming retirement of John Giannandrea, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Machine Learning and AI Strategy. That said, it seems as though Dye’s departure is on different terms, with Jon Gruber of DaringFireball.net writing:

It sounds like Dye chose to jump ship, and wasn’t squeezed out (as it seems with former AI chief John Giannandrea earlier this week). Gurman/Bloomberg are spinning this like a coup for Meta (headline: “Apple Design Executive Alan Dye Poached by Meta in Major Coup”), but I think this is the best personnel news at Apple in decades. Dye’s decade-long stint running Apple’s software design team has been, on the whole, terrible — and rather than getting better, the problems have been getting worse.

Gruber further elaborates on the criticisms of Dye in a follow-up piece on DaringFireball.net entitled “Bad Dye Job”, which is worth a read if you’re intersted in the state of Apple’s design team.

It will definitely be interesting to see how this change will affect the future of design at Apple!