Apple’s top design executive Alan Dye is leaving the iPhone maker to become the Chief Design Officer at Meta in a blockbuster coup for the social networking giant and big loss for Apple.
Did… Alan Dye ghost write that? I’m not sure if Gurman polled the Apple community about this but, despite this supposed “big loss”, people seem just short of giddy about it.
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The revolving door at Apple Park isn’t done spinning yet. In the wake of the announcements this week of departures for both AI chief John Giannandrea and design leader Alan Dye, Apple said on Thursday that its general counsel, Katherine Adams, and vice president of Environment, Policy and Social Initiatives Lisa Jackson, would both be stepping down next year.
The two will be replaced by a single executive: Jennifer Newstead, who most recently served as Meta’s chief legal officer.1
Jackson will retire in late January, at which point Adams will become both general counsel and head of Government Affairs; that organization will transition to Newstead in March 2026.
Such a move isn’t unprecedented: for example, Deirdre O’Brien became the head of both Apple’s People group and the Retail division after the departure of Angela Ahrendts in 2019.
However, a couple of details do stand out to me. Prior to her stint at Meta, Newstead was the legal adviser to the U.S. Department of State during part of Trump’s first term in the White House. She also previously worked in the White House as Associate Counsel in the George W. Bush administration, and subsequently served as General Counsel of the Office of Management and Budget.
That’s quite a change from Jackson, who headed up the Environmental Protection Agency during President Obama’s time in office and was specifically brought in to handle the company’s environmental efforts. But given the relationship Apple has been navigating with the current president, it’s perhaps not entirely surprising that the wind has shifted.
Also, Newstead will not head up environmental and social initiatives—those will instead transfer to newly installed chief operating officer Sabih Khan, who also picked up some new responsibilities in Giannandrea’s departure. Safe to say he’s going to be very busy; it does suggest that Apple considers its environmental affairs part of its operations pipeline.
Over all this continues to hover uncertainty about Tim Cook’s future, with some recent reports suggesting that he might announce his retirement sometime next year, though it’s more than possible that he might simply transition into the company’s chairman role. If nothing else, a long era of stability amongst Apple’s leadership has seen a lot of changes recently, and it may not be over yet.
A previous version of this article suggested that environmental and social initiatives would be subsumed by Government Affairs; updated to clarify that they have moved instead to Khan.
Dye, of course, left to head up Meta’s design studio, which gives all this the feeling of a big name sports trade. ↩
[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors, as well as an author, podcaster, and two-time Jeopardy! champion. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His next novel, the sci-fi adventure Eternity's Tomb, will be released in November 2026.]
I’m going to let you in on a little secret: I mostly don’t link to Daring Fireball because I assume that anyone who reads Six Colors reads Daring Fireball. And if you don’t, you probably should.
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.)
It’s got brutal honesty, the true read on Dye from people inside Apple, and how in the end it’s an opportunity for change. I can’t help thinking that the possibility of change is the thing that’s really exciting a lot of people who closely follow Apple and its products.
Gadgets we wish we owned, our favorite tech or software of the year, our best tips for helping aging relatives with tech, and our thoughts on John Giannandrea’s retirement from Apple.
Maybe it’s because my eyes are getting old or maybe it’s because the contrast between windows on macOS keeps getting worse. Either way, I built a tiny Mac app last night that draws a border around the active window. I named it “Alan”.
I learned a long time ago not to make it personal when it comes to criticizing Apple.
As someone on the outside looking in, I can (and do) judge what Apple does, but it’s hard to ever know the inner workings of a company if you’re not on the inside. You could blame one executive for a misstep, only to later discover that they argued against the move and were overruled. It’s a mug’s game, and what’s the point, really? Better to spend your Two Minutes Hate on a product or feature than burn an effigy of an Apple employee who might or might not have had anything to do with what you’re angry about.
There are times, however, when Apple elevates certain people and they become more than just faceless employees—they become representatives of the products and features they discuss, appearing in Apple’s own promotional videos, in interviews, and even speaking on tour around the world. It is hard not to start to make connections between those people and the things they represent, even if it’s a carefully crafted PR image and still may not reflect the reality of the situation.
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.
Here’s Gurman:
For Apple, the departure extends an exodus of talent suffered by the design team since the exit of visionary executive Jony Ive in 2019.
Dye had taken on a more significant role at Apple after Ive left, helping define how the company’s latest operating systems, apps and devices look and feel. The executive informed Apple this week that he’d decided to leave, though top management had already been bracing for his departure, the people said.
Gurman also spins this as a “major coup” for Meta and a “major loss for Apple.”
So. In the spirit of not making it personal, I think it’s hard to pile all of Apple’s software design missteps over the last few years at the feet of Alan Dye. He had support from other executives. He led a whole team of designers. Corporate initiatives and priorities can lead even the most well-meaning of people into places they end up regretting.
That said, Alan Dye has represented Apple’s design team in the same way that Jony Ive did ever since Jony took over software design. He was the public face of Liquid Glass. He has been a frequent target of criticism, some of it quite personal, all coming from the perspective that Apple’s design output, especially on the software side, has been seriously lacking for a while now.
I have definitely been critical of Jony Ive, especially in the post-Steve Jobs era, for many design missteps made by Apple. My personal theory is that Ive was largely burned out around the time that Jobs died, and that Apple made sure to elevate him and spotlight him in the wake of Jobs’s death as a way to reassure the world that Apple wasn’t just Steve and would be able to soldier on without him.
The firing of Scott Forstall in 2012 handed human interface design to Jony Ive. Again, I can’t say for sure, but it certainly feels like a man who had a brilliant run designing hardware might not have been the best choice functionally to lead that part of the operation. But in a time of crisis, it was a good time for Apple to say that its world-famous design chief was on it and everything would be fine.
After a few years had passed, that was no longer necessary, and it seems like Ive was pretty checked out. When he departed, he had lived long enough to see himself become the villain.
It occurs to me that Apple’s design group, led by Ive, accomplished some amazing things between 1997 and 2010. The post-Jobs era, however, was one of consolidation, growth, efficiency—basically mirroring the attributes we all ascribe to CEO Tim Cook. Apple was growing rapidly thanks to the iPhone. But keen observers of Apple’s products felt that something was off with design. The Trash Can Mac Pro. The Butterfly Keyboard. The Touch Bar. An aggressive MacBook Pro redesign that pushed USB-C to users too soon. And on the software side, a general feeling that Apple was not living up to its own standards in terms of interface design.
It sounds to me like a sort of malaise. Sir Jony Ive, with no worlds left to conquer, designed a gold Apple Watch and probably insisted on a lot of unnecessary features of the Vision Pro and envisioned a self-driving car Apple would never build, and eventually just gave up and moved on. (Maybe his new venture with OpenAI will be a thing, but I seriously doubt it.)
The same can probably be said of the team. Many senior designers have recently left Apple, including Evans Hankey and now Billy Sorrentino, another of Dye’s lieutenants, who is going with him to Meta. Others remain.
Without making it personal, it feels like any turnover in that group is a good thing. As much as I admire what Ive and his team accomplished in the first decade of the century, the last 15 years have been a lot rougher, hardware and software. Maybe everyone is better off if some new people step up and a new team is given the opportunity to build their own reputations?
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.
Apple has once again made a film focusing on people with disabilities, and how they use the company’s products. The new film celebrates International Day of Persons with Disabilities, which is December 3. This time, the focus is on college students at both work and play, using Macs, iPhone and iPads, all while a music video-style soundtrack plays.
While some past films featuring people with disabilities have focused on heartwarming relationships, the new, unnamed film offers a bit more attitude, and a message that people with disabilities have often struggled to pass along – we’re not remarkable, or special, or inspiring. Just like everyone else, we’re happy, we’re sad, we’re frustrated, we’re joyous. And of course, we use Apple products and their built-in accessibility features.
The film was directed by Kim Gehrig, whose previous Apple film, The Greatest, earned an Emmy in 2022. It features performances from a wide range of deaf and disabled students from around the world, with songwriting and musical production from Tony award-winning composer Tim Minchin.
Accessibility tools featured in the film include magnifier for Mac, Braille access, accessibility reader, sound recognition, live captions and assistive touch.
By now you’ve probably heard that Apple’s AI chief John Giannandrea is stepping down from his current role before his retirement early next year. Much has been written about Apple’s lagging in the AI arena over the past several years, as well as how much of that lies at Giannandrea’s own feet. But what I found particularly interesting is not Giannandrea’s departure—for which the writing has seemed to be on the wall for some months now—but the details of his replacement:
Apple also announced that renowned AI researcher Amar Subramanya has joined Apple as vice president of AI, reporting to Craig Federighi. Subramanya will be leading critical areas, including Apple Foundation Models, ML research, and AI Safety and Evaluation. The balance of Giannandrea’s organization will shift to Sabih Khan and Eddy Cue to align closer with similar organizations.
Back in 2018, Giannandrea joined Apple from Google, where he was the head of not only Google’s artificial intelligence, but also of search. At the time, it was widely seen as a coup for Apple, even though the company’s outside hires don’t always have the best track record.1
Subramanya is himself a former Google employee, where he headed up engineering for Gemini, before he moved to Microsoft in July of this year—less than six months ago. I have a hard time believing he’d been courted by Apple for any length of time, else why take the job at Microsoft? Maybe, as John Gruber points out, he really didn’t like Microsoft, or Apple offered him an amazing deal.
Still, the most salient fact would seem to be that Giannandrea’s replacement is from outside of Apple, which strongly suggests that there wasn’t anybody inside of Apple considered the right fit for the role. That’s not surprising, for two reasons: first, that Apple simply isn’t the hot AI company that all the AI experts want to work at. And second—and relatedly—the company has been hemorrhagingitsAIteam to other companies, especially Meta, over the past several months.
It’s also worth noting that Subramanya’s remit is narrower than his predecessor’s: he’s focusing on “Apple Foundation Models, ML research, and AI Safety and Evaluation” whereas Giannandrea’s current responsibilities include “Apple Foundation Models, Search and Knowledge, Machine Learning Research, and AI Infrastructure.” Apple says other parts of the team will be moved to newly installed chief operating officer Sabih Khan (presumably the infrastructure part, if that involves data centers and the like) and services chief Eddy Cue (presumably Search and Knowledge). He’ll also report to Craig Federighi, rather than Tim Cook directly, as Giannandrea did.
All of this reorganization comes just months before the company is said to be finally launching several Apple Intelligence features that it promised back in 2024. I can’t say whether Subramanya taking the reins bodes well or ill for the future of Apple Intelligence, but it’s clear that he has work cut out for him—the first step in which is probably rebuilding the company’s AI team.
If you want to take a trip down memory lane for some spectacular examples, look up John Browett and Mark Papermaster. ↩
[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors, as well as an author, podcaster, and two-time Jeopardy! champion. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His next novel, the sci-fi adventure Eternity's Tomb, will be released in November 2026.]
The late 1980s and early to mid 1990s were Apple’s weirdest and wildest era. Wedged between the triumph of the original Macintosh and the return of Steve Jobs were a sort of Wilderness Years where the company flailed all over the place, ultimately flaming out and requiring the now-famous rescue by its co-founder.
To be sure, 1990s Apple was a company with a load of problems, from out-of-control research labs building unsellable products to fruitless quests for software stacks that would reinvent documents and replace Mac OS itself. But that era of calamity and excess was also the source of some real gems, including the product that debuted 34 years ago, on Dec. 2, 1991: QuickTime.
Let it snow, let it snow, let it… Snow Leopard? We discuss Apple’s ’27 OS priorities, a decorative holiday app, how Apple might have approached engineering the folding iPhone, and a surprise return to Intel (sort of).
I am amazed by how the pattern-matching, troubleshooting parts of our brains work.
A little while ago, my father-in-law texted me and said, “Jason, are you available for me to talk to you about a problem with my phone?” This was his problem:
My phone is connected to my Wi-Fi, but it doesn’t show the Wi-Fi symbol. It says LTE and shows cellular bars. But when I go to Settings and Wi-Fi, it says I’m connected and shows me full bars of the Wi-Fi signal.
My troubleshooting brain, trained on hundreds of similar quirks over years and years, swooped into action.
Turn off Wi-Fi and then turn it back on. Nothing new.
Turn cellular off and then turn it on again. Nothing.
Use Wi-Fi settings to forget the home network, then reconnect. Nope.
Turn the phone off and back on. No change.
It was clear that the phone was connected to the base station, and even being assigned an IP address, but for whatever reason, data just wasn’t being routed. Even though every other device at their home was on the Wi-Fi network and working fine, I still had him pull the plug on the router and then plug it back in, just in the hopes that it might shake something loose, some bad routing configuration that would vanish with the power cycle. No luck.
My goal at this point was to find some way to reset the relationship between the Wi-Fi access point and his iPhone, because that was clearly where the problem lay. But how? So frustrating.
At this point, all my instinctual, easy options had been exhausted. So it was time to pull out a classic network troubleshooter, one that’s been on the iPhone since time immemorial for just these sorts of cases. I had him open the Settings app and navigate to Transfer or Reset iPhone: Reset: Reset Network Settings.
Putting this command amid the ones that will erase your phone is a little scary, and your phone even asks you for your password and a second confirmation before proceeding, but it’s the ultimate way to force your iPhone to start its network connectivity completely fresh. (In a way that just forgetting the Wi-Fi network does not.) It’s the last step in Apple’s own advice about failing to properly connect to a Wi-Fi network.
When the reset finally happened, his phone rebooted. He unlocked it. LTE still showed. He connected to the Wi-Fi, and after a nervous moment… the Wi-Fi icon appeared.
Here’s the funny thing: The week after this happened, I ran this scenario past Dan Moren on the Six Colors Podcast. His own troubleshooting brain ran through the exact same steps that I went through, in the same order, until finally reaching Reset Network Settings.
There are other things to try first, but when your iPhone is out-and-out misbehaving when it comes to Wi-Fi, Reset Network Settings is worth a go. It seems scary, but it has very few serious side effects (you’ll lose saved Wi-fi passwords, but that seems like a fair trade for getting connected) and sometimes is all you need to do to get things back on an even keel.
Happy Black Friday to all and may the blessing of the deals be upon you! This week Apple is on the rise, Apple sells out of something other than Tim Cook’s integrity (zing!), and some people will do anything to get you to listen to their podcast.
Where’s the beef?
How can you tell there’s no real news the week of Thanksgiving? Because we’re going to talk about Apple’s valuation, that’s how.
Because of fears of an AI bubble and a rumored deal between Meta and Google for AI chips, Nvidia’s stock has discovered that gravity does indeed affect it, despite all previous evidence to the contrary. Apple is now within striking distance of retaking the title of highest valuation.
What does all this mean?
Not. Much.
The highest valuation title does not even come with a free set of steak knives, so what’s the point? If you’re not getting free steak knives for doing something, why even do it?…
The vise-like grip of the holiday season has us in its peppermint-infused clutches once again. Perhaps you, like me, have found yourself once again having to shop for one among many relatives, randomly dispatched to you via the unfeeling chaos that is a Secret Santa gift exchange. As you browse through a generically unhelpful wish list—another Amazon gift card? How jejune—you may find yourself wondering: what do you get the person—or worse, the corporation—that has everything?
Well, if you happen to have drawn Apple for this year’s festivities, I have some suggestions for you. For I have been carefully observing the company over the last twelve months and have jotted down every time I’ve noticed something that it might just get some use out of. Here are a few suggestions that will be sure to inspire some shouts of joy in the corridors of Apple Park.
An AI company: Here’s a great little stocking stuffer.…
I just listened to your recent appearance on John Gruber’s The Talk Show. I was glad to hear more about the subscriber program you’ve begun at Six Colors, and I have a suggestion for a subscriber-only feature: a weekly podcast recapping the recent posts on the site.
He wrote that ten years ago this week. My initial response to Jason was that it was an “interesting idea” but that I was “hesitant to do more podcasts at this point.” And yet I immediately forwarded his email to Dan Moren and wrote, “I wonder if we just hopped on Skype once a week for 10 minutes as a part of a Six Colors meeting and recorded a recap podcast.”
Dan’s response: “I think doing a quick, informal podcast, might be interesting…. Plus if we could do it with minimal effort/editing, then it probably wouldn’t be too much overhead. At the very least, it’s probably worth trying! And podcasts are in our wheelhouse.”
A week later we posted the first episode of the “Six Colors Secret Subscriber Podcast.” (The RSS feed and episode URLs were entirely security-through-obscurity, hence the need for secrecy.)
A decade and 474 episodes later, thank you to listener Jason M. for the prod, and to all the Six Colors members who let us keep doing this thing. (We use Zoom now, and it’s more like half an hour, minimum, but it’s still quick, informal, and interesting!)
If you haven’t heard the podcast, there’s an unlocked sample episode as well as a delayed episode feed. Members at the higher More Colors and Backstage level get an extra post-show segment that’s sometimes as long as the actual show, and access to listen live when we record on our Discord.
When we launched the Six Colors membership plan, we had no idea how it would go. I think literally nothing from that initial membership benefits plan survives other than the general idea that by giving us money, you are manifesting more of our work into the world on this site. Our old “magazine” is now a regular newsletter of site content, we’ve added a member-exclusive weekly post from John Moltz, and most notably, we added a podcast we had never, ever intended to do—and based on all my surveys, most members consider it the biggest attraction in the membership!
Dan and I both do a lot of podcasts. This one is different, right down to the complete lack of notes and the occasional sound of my laundry running. Thanks again to Jason M. for suggesting it and to everyone else for making it worth doing almost every week for 10 years.
That said, we’re taking this week off! Our next new episode will be December 5.
Joseph Cox of 404 Media reports on an unusual phenomenon when he and other Apple users have seen “both the iOS and Mac versions of the Podcasts app… open religion, spirituality, and education podcasts with no apparent rhyme or reason.” It appears to be someone using Apple’s auto-opening technology to kick off a hacking attack:
That said, someone has tried to deliver something a bit more malicious through the Podcasts app. It’s the first podcast I mentioned, with the title “5../XEWE2′””"″onclic…”. Maybe some readers have already picked up on this, but the podcast is trying to direct listeners to a site that attempts to perform a cross-site scripting, or XSS, attack. XSS is basically when a hacker injects their own malicious code into a website that otherwise looks legit. It’s definitely a low-hanging fruit kind of attack, at least today. I remember it being way, way more common 10 years ago, and it was ultimately what led to the infamous MySpace worm.
Apple did not comment for Cox’s story. My guess is that this is someone testing around the edges to see if there’s a vulnerability here, but even if everything’s secure, nobody should have strange podcasts opening up in the Podcasts app.
