Apple is losing one of its most senior hardware executives. Paul Meade, the vice president who runs Apple’s Vision Products Group, is leaving the company next week to join OpenAI. According to Bloomberg, he will set up and lead a brand new in-house hardware division at the AI company.
Meade spent seven years leading hardware engineering for the Vision Pro headset. He also oversaw Apple’s smart glasses projects, products that were not expected to reach consumers until late 2027. Before joining the Vision Products Group in 2017, he worked on the iPad and iPhone. He knows how to build consumer hardware at scale, which is exactly the kind of experience OpenAI needs right now.
The timing matters. OpenAI has been working on AI-powered physical devices with Jony Ive’s startup, io, since 2025. That partnership turned into a $6.5 billion merger, though io still operates independently. Now OpenAI appears to want hardware expertise of its own, separate from Ive’s studio.
It is not yet clear how Meade’s new in-house team will fit alongside the Ive collaboration. Bloomberg says Meade will oversee development of a family of AI-powered devices. The Information reported earlier this year that Ive’s studio is separately working on a range of AI products, including a smart speaker expected sometime in 2027. Whether these two efforts will compete, overlap, or complement each other has not been explained.
The move also raises questions about what Apple loses here. Meade was not just a project manager. He was a foundational figure in Apple’s spatial computing push, a product category the company has invested heavily in despite slow Vision Pro sales. His replacement, Fletcher Rothkopf, was one of the founding members of the Vision Pro team, so Apple is not exactly scrambling. But losing institutional knowledge at that level is never nothing.
Bloomberg also reports that Meade’s decision to leave was at least partly triggered by internal changes at Apple. John Ternus, currently SVP of hardware engineering and effectively Meade’s boss, is set to become Apple’s CEO on September 1, taking over from Tim Cook. Leadership transitions often prompt senior executives to reassess their positions, and it appears Meade saw an opening at OpenAI worth taking.
For OpenAI, this hire is a statement of intent. The company has made no secret of its ambitions to move beyond software and into the physical world. Bringing in someone who built one of the most complex consumer hardware products in recent memory sends a clear signal that it is serious about that goal.
