By Mark Gurman
Apple Inc.’s top executive in charge of the Vision Pro headset and the company’s smart glasses efforts is leaving for OpenAI, continuing a streak of high-profile defections to rivals in the artificial intelligence and hardware sectors.
Paul Meade, a vice president, is set to leave Apple by next week and will then start at OpenAI’s hardware unit, according to people with knowledge of the matter. Meade will work on OpenAI’s upcoming family of AI-powered devices, said the people, who declined to be named discussing unannounced personnel moves.
Shares of Apple pared earlier gains on the news. They were up 2% at 3:25 p.m. in New York.
Meade’s departure is a blow to the iPhone maker. He has led hardware engineering for the Vision Pro headset — once seen as Apple’s next major computing platform — for seven years. Apple and OpenAI spokespeople declined to comment.
He has also been responsible for the development of display-free Apple smart glasses meant to vault the company into the AI wearables space next year and compete with a growing category pioneered by Meta Platforms Inc.
Meade’s team, known as the Vision Products Group, or VPG, is also in charge of the development of future augmented reality glasses planned for the end of this decade, as well as work on a slew of other AI-related wearable devices.
Many of Meade’s responsibilities are being assumed by Fletcher Rothkopf, his longtime deputy who is in charge of the product design function for the Vision Pro and smart glasses efforts.
At Apple, Meade has been a highly respected engineering leader, starting as a key iPad manager in 2010 before becoming head of iPhone program management in 2012. He joined the Vision Products Group in 2017 before taking over all hardware engineering in 2019.
At OpenAI, Meade will work with former Apple colleagues Jony Ive, Tang Tan and Evans Hankey, who used to run all design, hardware product design and industrial design at the iPhone maker. The trio founded an AI hardware startup that OpenAI acquired last year for $6.5 billion.
OpenAI has said it is working on several new devices that could roll out in the coming years. For its part, Apple is working on multiple new AI products, including smart home devices, a tabletop robot and a wearable pendant, as well as AirPods with cameras for seeing a user’s surroundings.
It is rare for an Apple vice president to leave for a competitor, aside from the designers who joined OpenAI. Another exception was Alan Dye, who ran Apple’s human interface group before joining Meta in December. OpenAI has separately pillaged Apple’s hardware engineering department for rank-and-file talent.
Meade’s pending exit is part of the fallout of John Ternus, the longtime head of all Apple hardware engineering and Meade’s former boss, stepping up to replace Tim Cook as chief executive officer on Sept. 1.
Apple chips boss Johny Srouji became chief hardware officer, replacing Ternus, and initiated a controversial shake-up of Apple’s hardware engineering unit in recent weeks. That led to a number of vice presidents under Ternus being given new roles and some executives feeling they had been demoted.
With Srouji taking over all hardware, Meade and several other hardware leaders now report to Tom Marieb, the new vice president of hardware engineering, rather than directly to Srouji. Marieb, in turn, reports to Srouji, effectively pushing many of those executives down a level in the organization.
Meade’s departure is another blow to Apple’s headset efforts.
Meade’s predecessor, Mike Rockwell, left his role running the organization to take over Siri. Rockwell brought several Vision Pro executives with him to help launch Siri AI this year, splitting the Vision Products Group into separate hardware and software organizations.
With the Vision Pro a sales flop, Apple has refocused its road map to heavily de-prioritize enclosed headsets and instead focus on glasses. The company has started work on and canceled several headset ideas over the past couple of years, including a cheaper and lighter Vision headset planned for 2027.
The company has since gone back to the drawing board on an enclosed headset, testing a device that it doesn’t expect to ship before the end of 2028 or 2029, Bloomberg News has reported.
