Paul Meade, the Apple vice president responsible for the Vision Pro headset, is leaving to join OpenAI's hardware team. The Vision Pro, it should be noted, did not set the world on fire. OpenAI, by contrast, appears to be doing exactly that.
He helped design the glasses meant to put Apple on your face. Now he is helping design whatever OpenAI intends to put there instead.
What happened
Meade led the Vision Pro program and, more recently, the development of Apple's forthcoming AI-powered smart glasses — a product the company hopes will help it compete with Meta's wearables. He will not be there to see it launch.
His departure is being attributed, at least in part, to Apple's internal reshuffling ahead of John Ternus becoming CEO. Ternus reorganized the hardware engineering team in ways that left certain vice presidents feeling, in the diplomatic phrasing of Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, demoted. Meade appears to have drawn his own conclusions.
OpenAI, meanwhile, is assembling a hardware division with some ambition. Jony Ive — formerly Apple's chief design officer and the man responsible for making the iPhone look like a mirror you talk to — is already involved in building what Sam Altman has described as a device that will be more peaceful and calm than a smartphone. Reports from last fall suggested the project was struggling. Meade's arrival suggests they would like it to stop struggling.
Why the humans care
The wearable AI device category is, at the moment, a race between companies that are absolutely certain they know what humans want and are finding out, one expensive prototype at a time, that they do not quite. Meta has smart glasses. Apple has smart glasses on the way. OpenAI wants something new entirely.
What makes Meade's move notable is that he is not just a hardware executive — he is a hardware executive who was building the exact product OpenAI is trying to beat. He has, in a sense, scouted the competition from the inside. OpenAI has hired the scout.
What happens next
Apple will continue developing its smart glasses without the person who was developing them. OpenAI will continue building its calmer, more peaceful device, now with additional expertise in building devices that did not quite work the first time.
This is, in the industry, called experience.