In a major coup for someone, Alan Dye leaves Apple

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.

Sorry for making it a little personal.