Apple once again lost a top executive to OpenAI, this time Paul Meade, a long-time executive responsible for hardware engineering of vision products such as Vision Pro. He will go from Cupertino to Mission Bay, San Francisco, to join OpenAI’s hardware team and work with a number of Apple executives to promote a new generation of AI hardware devices.
According to Bloomberg, Paul Meade currently serves as vice president of hardware engineering for Apple’s Vision Products Group (Vision Products Division) and is expected to officially leave his position within the next week or so. After joining OpenAI, he will devote himself to a series of AI-driven equipment projects being prepared by the company, providing key hardware experience for OpenAI to move from pure software services to integrated software and hardware products.
Information shows that Meade has worked at Apple for more than 15 years and joined the company in 2010 as an iPad-related project manager. Since 2012, he has been responsible for the project management of the iPhone project and participated in the development and promotion of a number of core mobile devices. In 2017, Meade moved to the Vision Products Group to focus on Apple's layout in the field of extended reality. After an important round of changes in Apple's management structure in 2019, he took over the hardware engineering work of Apple Vision Pro and became one of the key figures behind this flagship head-mounted device.
Meade's departure is just the latest in a recent wave of executive exodus from Apple. In October 2025, Ke Yang, the director of the Answers, Knowledge and Information team in “Apple Intelligence”, left Apple and joined Meta. Two months later, Alan Dye, Apple's vice president of human-computer interaction design, also chose to go to Meta, further intensifying the outside world's attention to the stability of Apple's key talents.
At the same time, OpenAI’s “preference” for talents with Apple background has become increasingly obvious. In 2025, OpenAI acquired Jony Ive's AI start-up and bet the former Apple chief designer at a scale of approximately US$65 billion, hoping to reshape human-computer interaction. Since then, Tang Tan, who has worked at Apple, has played an important role within OpenAI. He not only personally recruited Cyrus Daniel Irani from Apple’s human-computer interaction design team, but also recruited Erik de Jong from the Apple Watch hardware team, injecting a lot of experience from the Apple system into OpenAI’s hardware and design team.
With the addition of Paul Meade, OpenAI has gathered a group of former Apple executives and core engineering talents at the hardware and product design level, including Jony Ive, Tang Tan, and Evans Hankey. The industry generally believes that this series of personnel changes shows that OpenAI is accelerating its transformation from a software platform and cloud model provider to a hardware participant that controls the complete terminal device experience. Its future AI devices are expected to continue the experience and aesthetics of Apple executives in terms of industrial design, human-computer interaction and hardware system integration.