Meet Steve Lemay, the new head of User Interface design at Apple — the highest-profile software design job at the giant company, and possibly the world.
Unfortunately for Lemay, who has worked at Apple since 1999, he shares the same first name as the late Steve Jobs, who nicknamed him “Margaret” — a name that reportedly stuck.
Aside from being called “Margaret” internally at Apple, Lemay has a long and stellar design record at the company. He’s helped shape everything from OS X to visionOS. He is named on hundreds of patents, and helped develop one of Apple’s most highly-celebrated UI tricks.
Meet Apple’s new UI design chief, Steve Lemay
Photo: Imran Chaudhri/Instagram
The role of Apple’s head UI designer is perhaps the most coveted and influential software design job in the world. Apple has been setting the standard for software interfaces for more than 40 years, and its designs are widely copied and imitated. Whoever is in charge of UI at Apple sets the bar for the entire software industry.
From OS X to visionOS
Lemay joined Apple in 1999 and was most recently a designer in the company’s storied Human Interface design group, which was headed up by Alan Dye until Meta poached him.
Like a lot of Apple staffers, Lemay has a very, very low profile, thanks to the company’s obsessive secrecy. I searched the Internet and my small library of books about Apple, and could find only one reference to him, as a member of the original iPhone design team.
Lemay appears to have given only a couple of interviews, and seems to have no public social media feeds. But here’s what I could find.
The #iPhone design team, Marcel Van Os, Pat Coleman, Steve Lemay, Bas Ording. 6/29/07 Apple Store San Francisco. #apple #thisdayinhistory pic.twitter.com/SbUDJ3moNH
— Arno Gourdol (@arnog) June 29, 2017
As a software designer, Lemay has helped shaped all the company’s major operating systems, including macOS, iOS, iPadOS, watchOS and visionOS.
“Steve Lemay has played a key role in the design of every major Apple interface since 1999,” said Apple CEO Tim Cook in a statement to Bloomberg. “He has always set an extraordinarily high bar for excellence and embodies Apple’s culture of collaboration and creativity.”
Lemay’s promotion is a very good sign for the company, said a former colleague, software designer Ben Hylak.
“Steve Lemay is by far the best designer I have ever met or worked with in my entire life,” Hylak wrote on X. “Literally taught me what design is. Incredibly exciting for Apple.”
steve lemay is by far the best designer i have ever met or worked with in my entire life. literally taught me what design is.
incredibly exciting for apple. https://t.co/Yk2QvpG0R0
— ben (@benhylak) December 3, 2025
Lemay’s hundreds of patents
Lemay is named in hundreds of Apple patents dating back to at least 2003, including landmark patents like the final master patent for the iPhone (US 8,570,278 B2).
The list of Lemay’s patents on Justia, a searchable database of U.S. patents, runs to an incredible 53 pages. Lemay is credited with working on a huge range of projects, including virtual keyboards for portable devices, selecting text using gestures, handwriting entry on electronic devices, and much more.
Lemay was a key member of the original iPhone interface team, a small group that included Ken Kocienda, Imran Chaudhri and Bas Ording.
Lemay has also contributed to important apps like Photos and Maps, according to the website of Mike Matas, another member of the original iPhone team.
Lemay has also contributed to iPadOS, Siri and watchOS, according to a short Q&A with St. Paul’s School, his old high school in Concord, NH.
School was where “I fell in love with the Mac,” he said.
How he got the “Margaret” nickname
Lemay was humorously nicknamed “Margaret” by Steve Jobs after he answered questions aimed at “Steve” in meetings.
According to a New York Times interview with Francisco Tolmasky, who left Apple after the original iPhone launched in 2007:
“At some point Steve Jobs got really frustrated with this and said ‘Guess what, you’re Margaret from now on,'” Mr. Tolmasky said. From there on, members of the team would always address the designer Steve as Margaret.
Virtual Apple Pencil shadow on iPad Pro
Lemay appears to be behind a piece of recent Apple UI design that has been almost universally praised — the delightful virtual shadow effect for Apple Pencil Pro on iPad, according to a Design Milk interview where he talks about the feature.
“What we’re trying to do, in addition to empower people to create on the iPad, is to bring some of the joy of those analog experiences to the digital world,” Lemay said.
Apple’s attention to detail is INSANE. You can’t watch this and not smile. pic.twitter.com/cbUknR2wQu
— Quinn Nelson (@SnazzyLabs) May 16, 2024
Lemay’s promotion comes amidst a larger executive shake-up at Apple, with a wave of senior departures, but it looks like Apple is committed to maintaining its strong internal design culture.
Leander Kahney is the editor and publisher of Cult of Mac.
Leander is a longtime technology reporter and the author of six acclaimed books about Apple, including two New York Times bestsellers: Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products and Inside Steve’s Brain, a biography of Steve Jobs.
He’s also written a top-selling biography of Apple CEO Tim Cook and authored Cult of Mac and Cult of iPod, which both won prestigious design awards. Most recently, he was co-author of Cult of Mac, 2nd Edition.
Leander has been reporting about Apple and technology for nearly 30 years.
Before founding Cult of Mac as an independent publication, Leander was news editor at Wired.com, where he was responsible for the day-to-day running of the Wired.com website. He headed up a team of six section editors, a dozen reporters and a large pool of freelancers. Together the team produced a daily digest of stories about the impact of science and technology, and won several awards, including several Webby Awards, 2X Knight-Batten Awards for Innovation in Journalism and the 2010 MIN (Magazine Industry Newsletter) award for best blog, among others.
Before being promoted to news editor, Leander was Wired.com’s senior reporter, primarily covering Apple. During that time, Leander published a ton of scoops, including the first in-depth report about the development of the iPod. Leander attended almost every keynote speech and special product launch presented by Steve Jobs, including the historic launches of the iPhone and iPad. He also reported from almost every Macworld Expo in the late ’90s and early ‘2000s, including, sadly, the last shows in Boston, San Francisco and Tokyo. His reporting for Wired.com formed the basis of the first Cult of Mac book, and subsequently this website.
Before joining Wired, Leander was a senior reporter at the legendary MacWeek, the storied and long-running weekly that documented Apple and its community in the 1980s and ’90s.
Leander has written for Wired magazine (including the Issue 16.04 cover story about Steve Jobs’ leadership at Apple, entitled Evil/Genius), Scientific American, The Guardian, The Observer, The San Francisco Chronicle and many other publications.
Leander is an expert on:
Apple and Apple history
Steve Jobs, Jony Ive, Tim Cook and Apple leadership
Apple community
iPhone and iOS
iPad and iPadOS
Mac and macOS
Apple Watch and watchOS
Apple TV and tvOS
AirPods
Leander has a postgrad diploma in artificial intelligence from the University of Aberdeen, and a BSc (Hons) in experimental psychology from the University of Sussex.
He has a diploma in journalism from the UK’s National Council for the Training of Journalists.
Leander lives in San Francisco, California, and is married with four children. He’s an avid biker and has ridden in many long-distance bike events, including California’s legendary Death Ride.
You can find out more about Leander on LinkedIn and Facebook. You can follow him on X at @lkahney or Instagram.
