Bloomberg reports that Paul Meade, the Apple vice president overseeing the Vision Pro team, is leaving to join OpenAI’s hardware team. The move follows a reorganisation after John Ternus succeeded Tim Cook as Apple’s next chief executive, under which chip chief Johny Srouji was promoted to chief hardware officer and reshaped hardware engineering.
Meade and several other hardware vice presidents were asked to report to the new hardware-engineering chief Tom Marieb, who in turn reports to Srouji. The added layer left Meade and others feeling demoted, triggering departures. Meade spent over 15 years at Apple, on early iPad and iPhone programme management, joined the Vision Products Group in 2017 and led Vision Pro hardware for the past seven years.
Before leaving, he was secretly leading Apple’s first display-less smart glasses, a Meta Ray-Ban rival planned for late 2027. His role passes to his long-time deputy Fletcher Rothkopf, who leads Vision Pro and smart-glasses product design.
Why OpenAI wanted him
The hire signals OpenAI’s hardware strategy moving from design concept to industrial manufacturing. A year ago OpenAI bought io, the AI-hardware startup founded by former Apple design chief Jony Ive, for 6.5 billion dollars. Where Ive’s team leans toward form and product philosophy, Meade brings the hard engineering Apple lacked, how to pack complex sensors, low-latency architecture and spatial-computing parts into a compact consumer device.
Analysts read the poaching as proof OpenAI’s ambition is far beyond a phone app: it wants to put ChatGPT’s full multimodal ability into a wearable device perched on the user’s eyes and ears. Meade’s arrival is the manufacturing muscle to do it.
Editor’s note: This is an adapted translation of the original leiphone report. It has been trimmed and restructured for readability for an international business audience.