Paul Meade, the Apple vice president who ran the Vision Pro headset and the company's smart glasses programme, is leaving for OpenAI's hardware team. The move was first reported by Bloomberg's Mark Gurman. According to that reporting, it follows a reorganisation of Apple's hardware engineering unit tied to the appointment of John Ternus as Apple's next chief executive.
Who is Paul Meade, and what did he run?
Meade led the Vision Pro hardware engineering team for seven years. More recently he was running Apple's first smart glasses, a product reported to be due in late 2027. That put him at the centre of Apple's two biggest bets on wearable computing.
His longtime deputy, Fletcher Rothkopf, who handled product design for both the Vision Pro and the smart glasses, is reported to be taking over as head of the Vision Products Group.
Why is he leaving now?
The reporting points to a structural reason rather than a single rival offer. After John Ternus was named Apple's next CEO, the hardware engineering unit was reorganised. Meade and several other hardware leaders ended up reporting into a new layer of management, rather than directly to senior leadership, and several executives reportedly felt that amounted to a demotion.
So the story is less about money and more about where these leaders now sit in Apple's structure during a leadership transition.
What will he do at OpenAI?
Meade joins OpenAI's hardware team to work on its planned family of AI-powered devices. He will be reunited with former Apple colleagues: the designer Jony Ive, along with Tang Tan and Evans Hankey, whose AI hardware startup OpenAI acquired for 6.5 billion dollars.
