Meta is going for an Apple 'glow-up' with latest hires
The shake-up between Apple and Meta is starting to feel less like a talent pipeline and more like a jailbreak. As WIRED reported, Meta has nabbed two of Apple’s most influential designers, Alan Dye and Billy Sorrentino, in what looks like an unmistakable attempt to fix the thing users complain about most: Meta’s software feels like it was assembled on a Friday afternoon and never revisited.
Dye, once Apple’s vice president of Human Interface Design, is heading to Meta to run a new design studio inside Reality Labs. Sorrentino, who was a senior design director at Apple and also a former WIRED creative director, is joining him.
The duo will be responsible for shaping Meta’s next generation of AI hardware and the software that powers it. Mark Zuckerberg announced the hires in posts on Threads, framing the studio as a place where design, fashion and technology converge into the kind of product ecosystem Meta has tried and failed to pull off on its own.
The hires are not subtle. Dye helped define the interaction style of watchOS, the Apple Vision Pro and the polarising Liquid Glass redesign of iOS 26, which WIRED notes many designers adored aesthetically, even while admitting it was difficult to read. Meta is not just hiring talent. It is hiring taste.
And Meta desperately needs it. Analysts point out that Meta has always had a software problem. Inconsistency, clunkiness, interfaces that feel unpolished across Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Quest. Meta can ship powerful hardware, but it cannot keep pretending that an incoherent UI is a cute personality trait. If users are going to strap Meta devices to their faces or clip them to their clothes, the interfaces need to stop fighting them.
Meta’s new design brain trust arrives as the company pours billions into its AI hardware push. It is building smart glasses that people will actually wear, not just tolerate. Its Ray Ban partnership has given it a much-needed foothold in fashion, proving that if the frames look cool enough, users will forgive the occasional AI hallucination.
But the new Ray Ban Display glasses are already testing the limits of that theory. They are powerful and a bit chonky. Better industrial design alone cannot solve the real issue, which is that Meta’s devices rarely feel unified.
This is where Dye and Sorrentino matter. Their work at Apple shaped some of the cleanest, most coherent interaction systems in consumer tech. Meta’s hardware lineup is still a grab bag of VR headsets, experimental wrist interfaces and smart glasses that all behave like they were built by different companies. If anyone can impose order, it is two designers raised inside Apple’s famously exacting culture.
It also helps that they are leaving Apple at a vulnerable moment. It is struggling to make a case for its own AI hardware story. The Vision Pro flopped hard enough that Apple is now quietly leaning toward Meta-style smart glasses. Apple has lost multiple AI leads to rivals.
Even Jony Ive, Apple’s design saint, is now collaborating with OpenAI. Cupertino looks like a place in the middle of an identity crisis. Meta looks like a place that finally figured out what it wants to be.
Hiring Apple’s top design talent will not magically fix Meta’s software overnight. But it is a signal that Meta has realised something important. In the race to build AI hardware people will use every day, elegance counts. Coherence counts. Taste counts. And if Meta cannot grow it in-house, it will simply poach it from the company that defined the last decade of consumer technology.
Meta wants the Apple glow. Now it has the Apple designers. The rest is up to them
