Paul Meade, the Apple vice president who led the Vision Pro team, is leaving for OpenAI’s hardware team, according to Bloomberg. The move follows a reshuffle after Apple’s new CEO took over, which left Meade “effectively demoted.”
As John Ternus succeeded Tim Cook as Apple’s next CEO, longtime chip chief Johny Srouji was promoted to chief hardware officer. Srouji’s contested reorganisation added a layer: Meade and several other hardware VPs were told to report to new hardware-engineering VP Tom Marieb, who reports to Srouji. That extra layer made Meade and others feel demoted, triggering exits.
Meade spent over 15 years at Apple, early on on iPad and iPhone programme management. Since 2017 he was in the Vision Products Group, deeply leading Vision Pro’s hardware engineering for seven years.
Before leaving, he was secretly building Apple’s first screenless smart glasses, aimed at Meta Ray-Ban, planned for late 2027. His role goes to his long-time deputy Fletcher Rothkopf, who leads Vision Pro and smart-glasses design.
Why OpenAI wants him
The read across the industry: OpenAI’s hardware strategy is moving from “design concept” to “industrial manufacturing.” A year ago OpenAI acquired Jony Ive’s hardware startup io for $6.5 billion.
Where Ive’s team leans toward appearance and product philosophy, Meade brings the hard engineering Apple lacked: how to pack extremely complex sensors, low-latency architecture and spatial-computing parts into a compact consumer device.
Analysts say the poaching proves OpenAI’s ambition is far beyond a phone app. It wants to put ChatGPT’s full multimodal ability into a physical wearable “on the user’s eyes and ears.”
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. The full original (in Chinese) is at https://www.leiphone.com/latest/index/id/4754.