Meta has made a big move to hire two prominent designers away from rival tech giant Apple, likely putting them to work on designing Meta’s next generation of AI hardware and the software that runs on it.
Alan Dye, formerly Apple’s vice president of Human Interface Design, will join Meta to head up a new design studio within Meta’s Reality Labs. Billy Sorrentino, a senior director on Apple’s design team (and former WIRED creative director) will also join Meta’s Reality Labs.
In a post on the Meta platform Threads, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the two would lead the new studio and “bring together design, fashion, and technology to define the next generation of our products and experiences.” In his own Instagram post, Sorrentino confirmed the news. (In response to a request for comment from WIRED, a Meta rep pointed toward the Threads posts by Zuckerberg and Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth.)
Dye has long been a prominent figure in Apple’s design team, leading big pushes like watchOS, the Apple Vision Pro, and the somewhat controversial Liquid Glass redesign of iOS 26, which designers called beautiful but “hard to read.” His switch to Meta telegraphs a hunger from the Zuckerberg-run company to recreate Apple’s dominance in interaction design, even if it has also caused some people to joke about what the Liquid Glass guy will do to Meta’s design interface.
Anshel Sag, a tech analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, says that above anything else, the move telegraphs a move by Meta to fix its often stodgy and unappealing user interface across its platforms.
“Meta has always been a software nightmare,” Sag says. “There’s a lot of inconsistency across all of Meta’s software platforms. Facebook, Insta, WhatsApp, Quest—they have not had the highest standards of quality. That’s especially true of the user interface. If they want users to stay on their platform, they’re going to have to fix the UI.”
The move comes as Meta continues to go absolutely all in on its AI efforts. Earlier this year, Meta poured seemingly endless money into its effort to its so-called Superintelligence lab, which aimed to build a team of high-salary AI superstars to advance the company’s machine intelligence goals. (Hirees started leaving barely a month later.) At the same time, Meta is also considering big budget cuts to its Reality Labs efforts.
Above all, the company has leaned hard into its AI-powered smart gasses, all but cornering the market with its Ray-Ban Meta lenses. This is where Zuckerberg’s new attention to design and fashion come in, considering that the Meta smart glasses have succeeded in no small part because of the sharp designs of the frames made by its partner EssilorLuxottica. People aren’t going to wear smart glasses, no matter how powerful, if they look dumb. (Case in point, the new Meta Ray Ban Display glasses, which are very powerful but look real chonky.) Focusing on more elegant designs has clearly become a front-and-center priority for Meta. But more importantly, it has to make the devices work well together.
“In a lot of these cases, hardware is just a means to an end,” Sag says. “If the UI is clunky, it doesn’t matter how the glasses look.”
Dye and Sorrentino have shaped how interactions work on the Apple Watch, the Apple Vision Pro, and every modern Apple product, so they will no doubt inject some new capabilities into Meta’s lineup of wearables, which right now includes VR headsets and two smart glasses, one of which uses a wrist wearable to help control it. These new hires signal that those products will go in new directions—probably some much more Apple-y ones.
Dye and Sorrentino are also leaving Apple at a rough time for that company’s AI journey. Cupertino has struggled to match the device dominance Meta has achieved with its Ray-Ban smart glasses. Its Vision Pro headset has been seen as a high-profile misstep, which the company is reportedly in the early stages of attempting to fix by leaning into more Meta-esque smart glasses. Apple is also no stranger to seeing its former bigwigs turn to rival AI companies. Jon Ive, former Apple designer, has recently joined forces with OpenAI, which Apple has a contract with.
According to a Bloomberg report, Apple will forge ahead, replacing Dye with Apple UI designer Stephen Lemay.
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