Usman Salis
⬤ Apple's bleeding talent right now, and we're not talking about junior engineers. Multiple senior executives who report directly to Tim Cook just walked out the door in the same week—including the heads of AI, interface design, general counsel, and governmental affairs. The biggest bombshell? Johny Srouji, the guy who built Apple's entire in-house chip program, told Cook he's thinking about leaving. This is all happening while Apple's scrambling to catch up in AI, and the timing couldn't be worse.
⬤ Here's where it gets interesting—most of these people are landing at Meta. Siri's leader Robby Walker quit in October, and his replacement Ke Yang didn't even stick around two months before jumping to Meta's Superintelligence Labs. AI models chief Ruoming Pang? Meta. Tom Gunter and Frank Chu? Meta. Even Alan Dye, who's been shaping Apple's look and feel for years, is heading to Meta's Reality Labs. We're talking about engineers with 5 to 20+ years at Apple just walking away.
⬤ OpenAI's been on a hiring spree too, snagging dozens of Apple engineers from iPhone, Mac, silicon design, camera systems, audio, and Vision Pro teams. They even dropped over $6 billion to buy Jony Ive's hardware startup—that's how badly they want Apple's DNA. Word is, delays with Apple Intelligence and Siri, combined with fat paychecks from Meta and OpenAI, have tanked morale inside some teams. When your veterans are retiring and leadership's in flux, people start looking around.
⬤ Apple's competitors are scaling their AI programs at breakneck speed while Cupertino's watching its best people walk out. This kind of brain drain hits product timelines, slows down innovation, and makes the market wonder if Apple can actually compete in next-gen AI. Meta and OpenAI are loading up on engineering firepower, and how Apple responds to this exodus is going to determine whether it stays in the game or falls behind in the AI era.
Usman Salis
