Alan Dye, the former chief of Apple’s user interface design, has done brilliant, groundbreaking work — but almost no one is getting to experience it.
Dye just got poached by Meta, and the majority opinion among Apple fans seems to be “don’t let the door hit you on the way out.”
Some of Dye’s critics, like John “King of the Apple nerds” Gruber, are scathing. “His tenure is considered a disaster by actual designers inside and outside the company,” Gruber wrote after Dye’s departure from Apple became public Wednesday.
Dye, of course, is not perfect. He is rightly getting criticized for Liquid Glass, the shiny new interface in Apple’s operating systems, that’s been tweaked, rolled back, tweaked again, and is now semi-optional for users who don’t want it.
Where’s the conviction Apple is famous for? Steve Jobs must be spinning.
But Dye’s best work is spectacular, important and deep. You’ve just not seen it.
Why Meta poached Apple’s head UI design chief
Meta is one of the biggest, richest and most important companies in tech, but its fate is somewhat in the hands of the platforms it runs on. Apple already clipped Facebook’s insidious tracking on iOS, and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is keen to take fuller control of his company’s destiny.
That’s why he’s investing heavily in anything and everything that might lead to the next big consumer platform, whether it’s the metaverse, AR glasses or some AI-driven gadget we’ve not yet seen or imagined. And he’s not alone. All the tech companies are scrambling to invent the next big thing, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and former Apple design chief Jony Ive, who recently teamed up to build an AI companion.
Zuckerberg even spelled out the strategy himself in an announcement about Dye’s hiring on Threads (emphasis mine): “The new studio will bring together design, fashion, and technology to define the next generation of our products and experiences.”
Meta poached Dye to head up a new design studio that will develop several next-generation products, including VR headsets and AR glasses, all infused with a lot of AI.
Wait, did you say VR headsets?
Not coincidentally, Dye has been working on just such devices at Apple, and he helped invent by far the best AR headset out there: Apple’s Vision Pro.
Unfortunately, the Vision Pro is far from a hit. Apple has sold perhaps tens of thousands of units, small beans in the world of 250 million iPhone sales a year.
The headset is expensive and is struggling to find the “killer app” that will make it a must-have. Thus far, it delivers absolutely spectacular media experiences, but few people are willing to pay $3,500 for such a device.
Plus, it’s isolating. This might turn out to be a fatal flaw — the one thing the mass market will never get over. To use the Vision Pro, you must immerse yourself in its isolating bubble.
But if you do strap on a Vision Pro headset, it’s absolutely bloody marvelous.
visionOS: The AR UI to rule them all
Dye and his crew at Apple created a truly magical device that’s a joy to use. The Vision Pro interface is entirely intuitive, very quick to learn, and is genuinely easy to master. This is no small feat, but visionOS, the operating system that powers the Vision Pro, pulls it off beautifully.
It does this without goofy hand controllers. (Remember Steve Jobs’ famous line about touchscreens and styli? “If you see a stylus, they blew it.”)
The Vision Pro interface is extremely well-realized. It’s literally science fiction come to life — super-advanced technology that everyone’s brushing off.
Vision Pro: A beautiful glimpse of the future
It’s also beautiful. It’s the kind of genuinely good-looking interface that only Apple could produce, and Dye’s getting almost no credit for it.
visionOS is controlled by the user’s eyes, hands and voice, requiring an entirely new interface that is laid carefully over the real world. It’s no small feat that it remains legible in all kinds of environments, and doesn’t block out the world around you.
Even the goofy EyeSight display on the front is a small stroke of genius. Yeah, it’s a bit weird and murky and uncanny valley-ish, but it gives the headset that human touch Apple is famous for. It’s a first step in the right direction. I’m sure that subsequent revisions will look far better.
visionOS is so good, it won a prestigious Black Pencil design award from D&AD in 2025.
“It’s expensive, it’s heavy, but my God, it’s pure magic; Apple have created something totally new,” said Helen Fuchs, executive director of design at ustwo and a judge for the Black Pencils. “Making the OS so easy to use the first time you put it on is a feat of design. EyeSight is a thoughtfully designed response to keep people feeling present in a room whilst wearing the Vision Pro. All together, it’s utterly standout work.”
Vision Pro is clearly pioneering work — nobody’s done this before. Of course, Dye and company built on previous AR/VR work, but they managed to define the new category of “spatial computing” — and create by far the best interface out there.
This must have consumed a lot of Dye’s working time. Developing a new platform as polished and full-featured as Vision Pro must take millions of man-hours. Perhaps this is why Liquid Glass seems a bit half-baked?
Vision Pro is why Meta poached Alan Dye from Apple
All that effort becomes clear the first time you put on a Vision Pro — and so does the real reason why Meta hired Alan Dye away from Apple.
The Vision Pro is not some slapdash demo that Apple whacked together in a rush (like the original iPhone, which has held together with duct tape and gum when Steve Jobs first showed it off at Macworld).
Dye and his colleagues at Apple invented the future, setting the standard for VR/AR headsets. And no one’s praising his work on this marvelous device — except, perhaps, Zuckerberg.
This is why Meta poached Dye: to build VR headsets and AR glasses that rival the world-leading device he helped develop at Apple. Not to slap some Liquid Glass effects on the Facebook app.
Maybe all the rejoicing about Dye’s departure is just short-sighted and mean (although admittedly hilarious). Perhaps this really is a loss for Apple (although I’m kinda excited about the new guy).
We’ll see when future Meta devices roll out if Zuckerberg poached a genius or Apple got lucky with the one that got away.
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 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.
