Apple’s Vision Pro Hardware Chief Heads to OpenAI

Apple vice president Paul Meade, who led seven years of hardware engineering for the Vision Pro headset and was running Apple’s smart glasses program aimed at Meta’s Ray-Bans, is leaving the company by next week to join OpenAI’s hardware unit, according to a Bloomberg report on Friday. The move is the most senior defection yet from a Vision Products Group reshuffled under Apple’s new chief hardware officer, Johny Srouji. Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Meade will work on OpenAI’s “upcoming family of AI-powered devices,” Bloomberg reported, citing people with knowledge of the matter who declined to be named. He joins the consumer hardware effort that OpenAI has built around former Apple chief design officer Jony Ive and his startup io Products, which OpenAI acquired in May 2025. At Apple, Meade was overseeing both the AI smart glasses that Cupertino is preparing to challenge Meta’s wearables, and a separate team working on future augmented reality glasses. The Vision Pro hardware leader’s exit leaves Fletcher Rothkopf, Meade’s longtime deputy who runs product design for both products, in charge of the group.

Apple’s Vision Pro Hardware Chief Heads to OpenAI

Bloomberg broke the story on Friday, and outlets from MacRumors to 9to5Mac to AppleInsider confirmed the move the same day. Meade is set to leave Apple by next week and start at OpenAI’s hardware unit shortly after, the people said. His destination is the team OpenAI has assembled around Jony Ive, Tang Tan, Evans Hankey, and Scott Cannon, former Apple design and engineering leaders now operating inside the company.

For Apple, the timing is awkward. Meade ran the engineering team for the Vision Pro for seven years, then took over the broader Vision Products Group when former Vision Pro chief Mike Rockwell moved to lead Apple’s Siri upgrade. He is one of the few Apple executives who has lived through the iPad, iPhone, and the company’s first mixed-reality product. His departure removes the most senior figure still shepherding both the existing headset and the smart glasses that Cupertino hopes will be its answer to Meta’s Ray-Bans.

A 15-Year Run Rewritten in One Week

Meade joined Apple in 2010 as an iPad manager. Two years later he took over program management for the iPhone. In 2017 he moved into the Vision Products Group, and in 2019 he took over all Vision Pro hardware engineering. The biography reads like an Apple senior vice president in waiting, a steady progression through every flagship hardware launch of the past decade and a half.

Most recently Meade was running two parallel bets. The first is Apple’s first smart glasses, designed to compete with the Meta Ray-Bans and currently expected to ship in late 2027 after repeated delays. The second is a separate line of future augmented reality glasses that would push further into mixed reality than the current Vision Pro.

Both products now lose the executive who was driving the engineering behind them. Rothkopf, who has been Meade’s deputy and runs product design for the Vision Pro and smart glasses, will pick up the day-to-day work. The strategic direction, the one that survives the personnel change, was set in motion months ago.

The Hardware Shakeup That Pushed Meade Out

The proximate cause is Srouji’s appointment as Apple’s chief hardware officer, an April 20 promotion that expanded the longtime chip boss’s role to cover all hardware engineering. Srouji has since initiated what 9to5Mac, citing Bloomberg, described as “a controversial shake-up of Apple’s hardware engineering unit in recent weeks,” which led to “a number of vice presidents under Ternus being given new roles and some executives feeling they had been demoted.”

The structural change is concrete. Meade and several other hardware leaders no longer report directly to Srouji. They now report to Tom Marieb, the new vice president of hardware engineering, who in turn reports to Srouji. The reorganization has pushed many of those executives down a level in the org chart, from direct reports of the chief hardware officer to a layer below him.

For Srouji the move tightens his grip on a sprawling hardware portfolio that now spans chips, iPhone, Mac, iPad, the Vision Pro, and two upcoming glasses lines. For the executives caught in the middle, including Meade, the practical effect is a different title, a different boss, and in some cases a sense of having been demoted without being fired.

The shakeup arrives in the middle of a broader leadership transition. John Ternus, who previously ran all of Apple’s hardware engineering, takes over as chief executive on September 1, succeeding Tim Cook. Srouji’s elevation and Marieb’s new role are the personnel moves Apple built around that transition, and Meade’s exit is the most visible early fallout.

OpenAI’s Hardware Hiring Spree

OpenAI has been pulling Apple hardware talent for the better part of a year. The company acquired io Products, Jony Ive’s hardware startup, in May 2025 in a deal valued at $6.5 billion, and the io team formally merged into OpenAI later that year under the arrangement described in the io Products team joining OpenAI. Meade joins a roster that already includes some of Apple’s most senior former designers.

According to a MacRumors explainer from May, OpenAI has hired over 40 former Apple employees. The list includes Evans Hankey, who succeeded Ive as Apple’s head of design, and Tang Tan, the former Apple iPhone product design vice president. Tan was instrumental in recruiting Cyrus Daniel Irani from Apple’s Human Interface Design team and Erik de Jong from Apple Watch hardware. Apple has responded to the talent drain with retention packages of up to $400,000 in restricted stock units for members of the iPhone Product Design team.

• Jony Ive, former Apple chief design officer, founder of LoveFrom
• Tang Tan, former Apple iPhone product design vice president
• Evans Hankey, former Apple vice president of design after Ive’s exit
• Scott Cannon, former Apple designer, io Products co-founder
• Cyrus Daniel Irani, recruited from Apple’s Human Interface Design team
• Erik de Jong, recruited from Apple Watch hardware

Meade is the most senior of that group, and the first hardware engineering vice president from the Vision Products Group to cross over. He arrives at OpenAI with deep knowledge of how Apple’s mixed-reality products were built, how they were shipped, and where they fell short.

What Devices Are Lining Up at OpenAI?

Meade’s job at OpenAI will be to help build hardware, not just hire for it. The company has a device roadmap in development, and the first product out of the OpenAI and Jony Ive collaboration was originally due in 2026 but slipped. The product that is now expected to lead the lineup is a smart speaker with an integrated camera, priced between $200 to $300 and targeted for February 2027 at the earliest. Smart glasses, a smart lamp, and potentially earbuds are further out on the roadmap, and some of those products could be cancelled before they ship.

That lineup was already underway before Meade joined. A separate effort, an “AI agent phone” aimed at the iPhone, has been the subject of supply chain reporting by analyst Ming-Chi Kuo since late April. Kuo’s checks describe a smartphone built around a continuous, context-aware interface rather than individual apps, with a customized MediaTek Dimensity 9600 processor on TSMC’s N2P node and mass production targeted for the first half of 2027. Kuo has projected combined 2027 and 2028 shipments of around 30 million units if development stays on track. Sam Altman, on the day Kuo first reported the device, posted that it “feels like a good time to seriously rethink how operating systems and user interfaces are designed,” per the MacRumors explainer at OpenAI’s iPhone rival and broader device roadmap.

Meade’s mandate at OpenAI, according to the people cited by Bloomberg, is to work on that broader family of AI-powered devices rather than any single product. With seven years of Vision Pro hardware engineering on his resume, he is the most senior product builder OpenAI has hired from Apple yet.

A Broader Apple Talent Drain

Meade is the latest in a string of senior departures from Apple over the past eight months. In October 2025, Apple lost Ke Yang, head of the Apple Intelligence Answers, Knowledge, and Information team, to Meta. Two months later, Alan Dye, Apple’s vice president of Human Interface Design, left for Meta as well. Meade is the first Apple VP to exit for OpenAI rather than Meta, and the first to leave the hardware engineering side of the org chart rather than design or AI.

• October 2025 – Ke Yang, head of Apple Intelligence Answers, Knowledge, and Information team, departs for Meta
• December 2025 – Alan Dye, vice president of Human Interface Design, departs for Meta
• June 2026 – Paul Meade, vice president of hardware engineering for Vision Products Group, departs for OpenAI

Apple now runs the Vision Products Group under Rothkopf, with hardware engineering routed through Marieb and up to Srouji. The retention bonuses, the structural flattening, and the leadership transition to Ternus are the company’s response. Whether that response is enough to hold the next senior hardware VP is the question the September 1 CEO handoff will answer, by leaving Srouji in place to run the hardware side as the executive he reorganized reports up through him.