It has been claimed that Paul Meade, one of the vice presidents of the Apple Vision Pro product group, will leave the company next week and join OpenAI. According to Bloomberg, Meade was among the senior names responsible for the Vision Pro mixed reality headset, as well as the smart glasses projects Apple was working on. In his new position, it is stated that he will undertake the management of the hardware unit created within OpenAI and will direct the company’s artificial intelligence-supported device efforts.
OpenAI has been working with Apple’s former design chief Jony Ive since 2025 to develop new artificial intelligence-focused hardware. Later, the io initiative founded by Ive joined the OpenAI umbrella with a deal worth approximately 6.5 billion dollars. Despite this, it was stated that the initiative maintained its independent structure. The fact that Paul Meade will work directly within OpenAI raises questions about how the new hardware organization within the company will relate to this collaboration.
OpenAI is working on a family of AI-powered devices
According to information provided by Bloomberg, Paul Meade will manage the hardware development process of the artificial intelligence-supported device family that OpenAI plans to develop. It is stated that the company is working on multiple devices that address different usage scenarios instead of just a single product. It is not yet clear how these works will be coordinated with Jony Ive’s design team.
In another news published by The Information earlier in the year, it was claimed that Ive’s design studio was working on various artificial intelligence devices. It was stated that these products included a smart speaker and that the device in question was aimed to be available in 2027. An official statement regarding the technical details or product planning of these projects has not yet been made by OpenAI.
Paul Meade led hardware engineering for Vision Pro for nearly seven years at Apple. In addition, he served as one of the leaders of the smart glasses projects that the company has been developing for a long time. Various previously published reports suggested that Apple was planning to introduce its first smart glasses towards the end of 2027. It is known that Meade also played important roles in the iPhone and iPad development teams before Vision Products Group in his career. The manager, who joined Vision Products Group in 2017, became the head of the group’s hardware engineering a few years later.
Fletcher Rothkopf, one of the founding members of the Vision Pro team, will take over a significant part of Meade’s duties at Apple. Thus, it is stated that the distribution of tasks in the engineering organization within the Vision Products Group will be reshaped. There is currently no official evaluation on how Apple’s long-term projects in the field of smart glasses and mixed reality will be affected by this change.
According to Bloomberg, the expected change in Apple management was also influential behind Paul Meade’s decision to leave. The news states that John Ternus, who currently serves as Senior Vice President of Hardware Engineering, is expected to replace Tim Cook as Apple CEO as of September 1. It is considered that this change in the management level has also reshaped the distribution of senior tasks within the company.
Paul Meade’s joining OpenAI is a remarkable transfer in terms of developing products that combine artificial intelligence and hardware. It will become clearer in the coming period how Meade, who has gained experience in mixed reality and consumer electronics at Apple for many years, will direct OpenAI’s work on the hardware side. On the other hand, both Apple’s smart glasses plans and the first products to be born from the partnership between OpenAI and Jony Ive continue to be among the developments that the technology industry will follow closely.