Bloomberg reports Paul Meade, the Apple vice president who led the Vision Pro team, is leaving to join OpenAI’s hardware group. The move follows a contested reorganisation after John Ternus succeeded Tim Cook as the next CEO and promoted Johny Srouji to chief hardware officer. Srouji rebuilt hardware engineering so Meade and several other VPs now report to Tom Marieb, who reports to Srouji, a new layer that left Meade feeling “effectively demoted” and triggered his exit.
Meade spent over fifteen years at Apple, early on in iPad and iPhone programme management, and since 2017 in the Vision Products Group, deeply leading Vision Pro hardware engineering for the past seven years. Before leaving he was secretly building Apple’s first display-free smart glasses, aimed at Meta’s Ray-Ban, planned for late 2027. His role passes to long-time deputy Fletcher Rothkopf, who leads Vision Pro and smart-glasses product design.
Why OpenAI wants Meade
The read across the industry is that OpenAI’s hardware strategy is moving from “design concept” to “industrial manufacturing”. A year ago OpenAI bought io, the AI hardware start-up from former Apple design chief Jony Ive, for 6.5 billion dollars. Where Ive’s team leans toward look and product philosophy, Meade brings the hard engineering Apple lacked, how to cram complex sensors, low-latency architecture and spatial-compute parts into a compact consumer device.
Outside analysis says the poaching proves OpenAI’s ambition is far beyond a phone app: it wants to put ChatGPT’s full multimodal ability into a wearable perched on the user’s eyes and ears.
Editor’s note: This is an adapted translation of the original LeiFeng Net report. It has been trimmed and restructured for readability for an international business audience.