Apple Design Official Alan Dye Poached by Meta in Major Coup

My initial thought was that I wanted someone like Bruce Tognazzini or Don Norman to return, but then I looked up their ages; the former is 80 and the latter is in his 90s. They’re probably enjoying their retirements.

As a long-time Mac user who has switched back to PCs for personal use but who still uses a work-issued Mac, one of my wishes for the Mac is for Apple to fully embrace the notion of the Mac being a desktop operating system and to be very cautious about adopting iOS design principles. Desktops have different use cases than mobile devices, and the UI/UX for desktops should reflect this.

It’s not that we have to return to the 1990s-era Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines; it’s almost 2026, and I’m sure there have been plenty of advances in HCI research since the 1990s. However, there’s a lot of treasure in the old UI guidelines that needs to be rediscovered by today’s software designers. It seems to me that contemporary UI design is a mess across the board, not just with Apple, but in the entire industry, affecting both proprietary and open-source software.

I wouldn’t associate anything Meta does with the word 'design'. Instagram’s UI changes every two months for no good reason, and now there’s a big, ugly, and completely useless 'Ask Meta AI' button in WhatsApp, right under your thumb. Maybe we’ll even get some liquid glass effects next.

I’m hoping that this will lead Apple to be a little bit less dogmatic about hiding functional UI elements.

If Apple can manage it, a shift to legible UI, with clearly designed hierarchies will feel like a breath of fresh air.

Similar to how Ive’s departure from industrial design lead to a trend towards more functional product design (eg thicker MacBook pros, the iPhone 17 pro, Apple Watch Ultra).

Hopefully Dye’s replacement is not just cut from the same cloth as Dye himself.

Good news for Apple users

As a Liquid Glass hater, I hope this will help them roll back some of the terrible garbage that should never have been greenlit in the first place.

That said: He also oversaw design languages that I liked (everything before and perhaps including Big Sur), so I guess it’s not like he messes up everything he touches.

It is only fitting that Meta Glass becomes as opaque as iOS 26.

Zuck's shopping spree continues

From Gruber’s footnotes - both company’s average IQ increased.

I want to be optimistic, but Dye was just a symptom. The rot in modern Apple design must run much deeper.

Recruited not poached.