The sentiment within the ranks at Apple is that today’s news is almost too good to be true. People had given up hope that Dye would ever get squeezed out, and no one expected that he’d just up and leave on his own. (If you care about design, there’s nowhere to go but down after leaving Apple. What people overlooked is the obvious: Alan Dye doesn’t actually care about design.)
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Putting Alan Dye in charge of user interface design was the one big mistake Jony Ive made as Apple’s Chief Design Officer.4 Dye had no background in user interface design — he came from a brand and print advertising background. Before joining Apple, he was design director for the fashion brand Kate Spade, and before that worked on branding for the ad agency Ogilvy. His promotion to lead Apple’s software interface design team under Ive happened in 2015, when Apple was launching Apple Watch, their deepest foray into the world of fashion. It might have made some sense to bring someone from the fashion/brand world to lead software design for Apple Watch, but it sure didn’t seem to make sense for the rest of Apple’s platforms. And the decade of Dye’s HI leadership has proven it.
The facts: Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman has continued his series of scoops about Meta hiring Apple employees by reporting that Alan Dye is leaving Apple for Meta. Dye was Apple’s VP of Interface and the figurehead of numerous Apple product announcements, most notably this summer’s rollout of the fairly divisive new “Liquid Glass” interface appearance.
Apple also confirmed to Bloomberg that his replacement is Stephen Lemay, who has been at Apple since 1999 and is a software designer by trade. The people I know at Apple speak of Lemay highly.
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So is this a major loss for Apple and a major coup for Meta, as Mark Gurman editorializes? I don’t see it. Maybe those top executives who were “bracing” for his departure feel that way, though my gut feeling is that if Apple really wanted Alan Dye to stay at Apple, they would’ve kept him. I think it’s more likely that in the wake of Jeff Williams retiring as COO, other changes are afoot at Apple, and perhaps Dye felt it was the right time to leave. Certainly, being offered what must be a truckload of money by Mark Zuckerberg couldn’t hurt things.
What I’m saying is, sometimes when you’re “bracing” for a departure of a senior employee, you’re doing it because they think they’re more valuable than you think they are. I don’t know if that happened in this case. Change is hard, and it’s natural for people (including Apple executives) to want to keep the band together as long as possible. But in the end, I think Alan Dye’s departure is a major coup for Apple.
“We are old and tired and just want to be taken care of.” - Republican voter, Dec. 2024.
True statement*
Posted by Herman Blume on December 13, 2025, 17:14:59, in reply to "iOS 26 blows*"
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but the new upgrade makes it so much more of a pain in the ass
Re: iOS 26 blows. Also, they raised the height of the dock bar for NO REASON
Posted by Stu on December 13, 2025, 17:08:45, in reply to "iOS 26 blows*"
on December 13, 2025, 17:06:29
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