Seven years, two flagship hardware bets. Paul Meade steered the Vision Pro from early engineering sketches to store shelves, and was simultaneously developing the smart glasses Apple hoped would take on Meta's Ray-Bans. He's now leaving for OpenAI — to build something entirely different.
According to Bloomberg, Meade will depart Apple within days. The trigger was a leadership reshuffle that followed John Ternus becoming Apple's new CEO. Johny Srouji took the newly created role of chief hardware officer, and the reorganization left several vice presidents feeling effectively sidelined. Meade, people familiar with the matter said, was among them.
At OpenAI, Meade joins the team building physical AI devices. The company has been working on hardware for months alongside Jony Ive — the designer behind the iPhone, iPod, and original Mac. Meade brings exactly what that effort needs: he knows how to take ambitious hardware from prototype to mass production. He did it with iPad in 2010, iPhone in 2012, and then spent years running Apple's Vision Products Group in its entirety.
Vision Pro never became a mass-market product. At $3,499, it found enthusiastic early buyers but didn't shift the broader market toward spatial computing the way Apple had hoped. The smart glasses project, now losing its lead architect, still has no public launch date. For OpenAI, the hire sends an unmistakable message: this isn't a software company dabbling in hardware. It's building for real.
This isn't the first senior Apple hardware engineer to cross over to OpenAI. The company has been quietly assembling expertise in chips, batteries, displays, and manufacturing. Whether the result ends up closer to a phone, a headset, or something neither company has tried before — one of Apple's most experienced hardware builders just switched sides to find out.
