2025-12-05 06:25:09
The revolving door at Apple Park isn’t done spinning yet. In the wake of the announcements this week of departures for both AI chief John Giannandrea and design leader Alan Dye, Apple said on Thursday that its general counsel, Katherine Adams, and vice president of Environment, Policy and Social Initiatives Lisa Jackson, would both be stepping down next year.
The two will be replaced by a single executive: Jennifer Newstead, who most recently served as Meta’s chief legal officer.1
Jackson will retire in late January, at which point Adams will become both general counsel and head of Government Affairs; that organization will transition to Newstead in March 2026.
Such a move isn’t unprecedented: for example, Deirdre O’Brien became the head of both Apple’s People group and the Retail division after the departure of Angela Ahrendts in 2019.
However, a couple of details do stand out to me. Prior to her stint at Meta, Newstead was the legal adviser to the U.S. Department of State during part of Trump’s first term in the White House. She also previously worked in the White House as Associate Counsel in the George W. Bush administration, and subsequently served as General Counsel of the Office of Management and Budget.
That’s quite a change from Jackson, who headed up the Environmental Protection Agency during President Obama’s time in office and was specifically brought in to headed up environmental efforts. But given the relationship Apple has been navigating with the current president, it’s perhaps not entirely surprising that the wind has shifted.
Also, Newstead will not head up environmental and social initiatives—those will instead transfer to newly installed chief operating officer Sabih Khan, who also picked up some new responsibilities in Giannandrea’s departure. Safe to say he’s going to be very busy; it does suggest that Apple considers its environmental affairs part of its operations pipeline.
Over all this continues to hover uncertainty about Tim Cook’s future, with some recent reports suggesting that he might announce his retirement sometime next year, though it’s more than possible that he might simply transition into the company’s chairman role. If nothing else, a long era of stability amongst Apple’s leadership has seen a lot of changes recently, and it may not be over yet.
A previous version of this article suggested that environmental and social initiatives would be subsumed by Government Affairs; updated to clarify that they have moved instead to Khan.
2025-12-05 02:40:35
I’m going to let you in on a little secret: I mostly don’t link to Daring Fireball because I assume that anyone who reads Six Colors reads Daring Fireball. And if you don’t, you probably should.
But in the wake of Alan Dye’s departure yesterday, I feel I need to explicitly link to John Gruber’s long, sourced, well-thought-out piece on the subject:
The sentiment within the ranks at Apple is that today’s news is almost too good to be true. People had given up hope that Dye would ever get squeezed out, and no one expected that he’d just up and leave on his own. (If you care about design, there’s nowhere to go but down after leaving Apple. What people overlooked is the obvious: Alan Dye doesn’t actually care about design.)
It’s got brutal honesty, the true read on Dye from people inside Apple, and how in the end it’s an opportunity for change. I can’t help thinking that the possibility of change is the thing that’s really exciting a lot of people who closely follow Apple and its products.
2025-12-04 06:29:07
Gadgets we wish we owned, our favorite tech or software of the year, our best tips for helping aging relatives with tech, and our thoughts on John Giannandrea’s retirement from Apple.
2025-12-04 05:33:44
Tyler Hall, annnouncing his new free Mac utility:
Maybe it’s because my eyes are getting old or maybe it’s because the contrast between windows on macOS keeps getting worse. Either way, I built a tiny Mac app last night that draws a border around the active window. I named it “Alan”.
2025-12-04 05:23:14
I learned a long time ago not to make it personal when it comes to criticizing Apple.
As someone on the outside looking in, I can (and do) judge what Apple does, but it’s hard to ever know the inner workings of a company if you’re not on the inside. You could blame one executive for a misstep, only to later discover that they argued against the move and were overruled. It’s a mug’s game, and what’s the point, really? Better to spend your Two Minutes Hate on a product or feature than burn an effigy of an Apple employee who might or might not have had anything to do with what you’re angry about.
There are times, however, when Apple elevates certain people and they become more than just faceless employees—they become representatives of the products and features they discuss, appearing in Apple’s own promotional videos, in interviews, and even speaking on tour around the world. It is hard not to start to make connections between those people and the things they represent, even if it’s a carefully crafted PR image and still may not reflect the reality of the situation.
The facts: Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman has continued his series of scoops about Meta hiring Apple employees by reporting that Alan Dye is leaving Apple for Meta. Dye has been Apple’s head of design and the figurehead of numerous Apple product announcements, most notably this summer’s rollout of the fairly divisive new “Liquid Glass” interface appearance.
Apple also confirmed to Bloomberg that the new head of design is Stephen Lemay, who has been at Apple since 1999 and is a software designer by trade. The people I know at Apple speak of Lemay highly.
Here’s Gurman:
For Apple, the departure extends an exodus of talent suffered by the design team since the exit of visionary executive Jony Ive in 2019.
Dye had taken on a more significant role at Apple after Ive left, helping define how the company’s latest operating systems, apps and devices look and feel. The executive informed Apple this week that he’d decided to leave, though top management had already been bracing for his departure, the people said.
Gurman also spins this as a “major coup” for Meta and a “major loss for Apple.”
So. In the spirit of not making it personal, I think it’s hard to pile all of Apple’s design missteps over the last few years at the feet of Alan Dye. He had support from other executives. He led a whole team of designers. Corporate initiatives and priorities can lead even the most well-meaning of people into places they end up regretting.
That said, Alan Dye represents Apple’s design team in the same way that Jony Ive did. He was the public face of Liquid Glass. He has been a frequent target of criticism, some of it quite personal, all coming from the perspective that Apple’s design output, especially on the software side, has been seriously lacking for a while now.
I have definitely been critical of Jony Ive, especially in the post-Steve Jobs era, for many design missteps made by Apple. My personal theory is that Ive was largely burned out around the time that Jobs died, and that Apple made sure to elevate him and spotlight him in the wake of Jobs’s death as a way to reassure the world that Apple wasn’t just Steve and would be able to soldier on without him.
The firing of Scott Forstall in 2012 handed human interface design to Jony Ive. Again, I can’t say for sure, but it certainly feels like a man who had a brilliant run designing hardware might not have been the best choice functionally to lead that part of the operation. But in a time of crisis, it was a good time for Apple to say that its world-famous design chief was on it and everything would be fine.
After a few years had passed, that was no longer necessary, and it seems like Ive was pretty checked out. When he departed, he had lived long enough to see himself become the villain.
It occurs to me that Apple’s design group, led by Ive, accomplished some amazing things between 1997 and 2010. The post-Jobs era, however, was one of consolidation, growth, efficiency—basically mirroring the attributes we all ascribe to CEO Tim Cook. Apple was growing rapidly thanks to the iPhone. But keen observers of Apple’s products felt that something was off with design. The Trash Can Mac Pro. The Butterfly Keyboard. The Touch Bar. An aggressive MacBook Pro redesign that pushed USB-C to users too soon. And on the software side, a general feeling that Apple was not living up to its own standards in terms of interface design.
It sounds to me like a sort of malaise. Sir Jony Ive, with no worlds left to conquer, designed a gold Apple Watch and probably insisted on a lot of unnecessary features of the Vision Pro and envisioned a self-driving car Apple would never build, and eventually just gave up and moved on. (Maybe his new venture with OpenAI will be a thing, but I seriously doubt it.)
The same can probably be said of the team. Many senior designers have recently left Apple, including Evans Hankey and now Billy Sorrentino, another of Dye’s lieutenants, who is going with him to Meta.
Without making it personal, it feels like turnover in that group is a good thing. As much as I admire what Ive and his team accomplished in the first decade of the century, the last 15 years have been a lot rougher. Maybe everyone is better off if some new people step up and a new team is given the opportunity to build their own reputations?
So is this a major loss for Apple and a major coup for Meta, as Mark Gurman editorializes? I don’t see it. Maybe those top executives who were “bracing” for his departure feel that way, though my gut feeling is that if Apple really wanted Alan Dye to stay at Apple, they would’ve kept him. I think it’s more likely that in the wake of Jeff Williams retiring as COO, other changes are afoot at Apple, and perhaps Dye felt it was the right time to leave. Certainly, being offered what must be a truckload of money by Mark Zuckerberg couldn’t hurt things.
What I’m saying is, sometimes when you’re “bracing” for a departure of a senior employee, you’re doing it because they think they’re more valuable than you think they are. I don’t know if that happened in this case. Change is hard, and it’s natural for people (including Apple executives) to want to keep the band together as long as possible. But in the end, I think Alan Dye’s departure is a major coup for Apple.
Sorry for making it a little personal.
2025-12-04 02:40:20
Apple has once again made a film focusing on people with disabilities, and how they use the company’s products. The new film celebrates International Day of Persons with Disabilities, which is December 3. This time, the focus is on college students at both work and play, using Macs, iPhone and iPads, all while a music video-style soundtrack plays.
While some past films featuring people with disabilities have focused on heartwarming relationships, the new, unnamed film offers a bit more attitude, and a message that people with disabilities have often struggled to pass along – we’re not remarkable, or special, or inspiring. Just like everyone else, we’re happy, we’re sad, we’re frustrated, we’re joyous. And of course, we use Apple products and their built-in accessibility features.
The film was directed by Kim Gehrig, whose previous Apple film, The Greatest, earned an Emmy in 2022. It features performances from a wide range of deaf and disabled students from around the world, with songwriting and musical production from Tony award-winning composer Tim Minchin.
Accessibility tools featured in the film include magnifier for Mac, Braille access, accessibility reader, sound recognition, live captions and assistive touch.
