Apple Loses More Top Talent, This Time To Jony Ive And OpenAI
Following the departure of several key engineers from Apple's AI department, and even the designer from the iPhone Air project, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reports on his Power On newsletter that OpenAI and Jony Ive keep poaching Apple's hardware engineering group, as it has hired more than 40 people in the past few months. With that, it seems Apple is losing key employees to continue developing its current and future technologies.
According to Gurman, this is part of the plan from OpenAI's Sam Altman, and former Apple design chief Jony Ive, to develop a family of beautiful hardware devices, which we might see a glimpse of in 2026. The journalist says that among the new hires, OpenAI got former Apple industrial design head Evans Hankey and former hardware engineering executive Tang Tan. Still, it seems Apple is losing many rank-and-file hardware engineers as well.
The journalist's sources say Apple is not pleased about OpenAI's poaching, and it's now considering it a problem, as Apple has lost key directors, managers, and engineers from areas such as camera engineering, iPhone hardware, Mac hardware, silicon, device testing and reliability, industrial design, manufacturing, audio, smartwatches, and more.
Here's a throwback to the Steve Jobs era, and how he would keep employees
Seeing this Apple exodus from top employees makes me remember Steve Jobs' famous message to then Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen. At the time, Jobs wrote to Chizen that Adobe hired one person from Apple while calling lots more, followed by this: "I have a standing policy with our recruiters that we don't recruit from Adobe. It seems you have a different policy. One of us must change our policy. Please let me know who."
While Apple is known for not matching super salaries from other Big Tech companies, especially when someone is poaching its employees, it's interesting to see that the company can't do much to retain its talent, while also seeing some of its most important executives retire or just stepping down.
Even though the company has thousands of employees, the picture Bloomberg and other publications are painting shows that Apple is not prepared to lose this amount of talent in such a short period, especially with the current issues regarding the Siri team and development of key new products, including foldable devices and AR glasses.