Apple has handed out rare, out-of-cycle bonuses to its iPhone Product Design team—restricted stock units worth $200,000 to $400,000 over four years—in what amounts to a direct response to a sustained wave of poaching from AI startups, particularly OpenAI. Bloomberg reported the development, noting the awards vest over four years, so designers only collect the full amount if they stay.
Apple’s best hardware minds have been walking out the door
The recruitment pressure has a face, and a name. Tang Tan—a former Apple VP who once ran the exact iPhone design team now getting these bonuses—now heads OpenAI’s hardware division, and he’s been busy. Several dozen Apple engineers have followed him out the door, drawn from teams that built the iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and Vision Pro. Above Tan is Jony Ive, Apple’s most storied design chief, who partnered with Sam Altman in 2024 to build a new generation of AI-native devices aimed at eventually replacing the iPhone as consumers’ primary hardware. Even Meta has gotten in on the drain—Alan Dye, who led Apple’s UI design for a decade, left for Zuckerberg’s camp late last year. with Apple designer Billy Sorrentino following close behind. A newer startup called Hark—founded by Figure AI’s Brett Adcock—has also poached Apple product design engineers, including a designer who worked on the iPhone Air.The current iPhone Product Design team, now run by Rich Dinh under hardware engineering chief John Ternus, is the one being targeted most aggressively.Though, the compensation gap is the harder problem to solve. Bloomberg reports OpenAI is paying some Apple engineers around $1 million in stock per year to switch sides. Apple’s retention bonuses, generous as they are by most standards, land at roughly a fifth to half of that figure.
Apple has written this check before, but the competition has deepened
The company ran a similar retention bonus exercise about three years ago, and separately bumped pay for its internal AI research group last year when Meta was dangling offers reportedly north of $100 million to lure researchers. Apple knows how to play defense. But the scale of the current talent exodus, and the fact that it’s flowing directly to companies building competing hardware, makes this round feel different.Apple is trying to build its own AI hardware future—smart glasses, a Siri pendant, camera-equipped AirPods—and the people who know how to execute that vision are exactly the ones being recruited away. A four-year vesting cliff is a reasonable deterrent. Whether it’s enough against what OpenAI is writing on the other side is another matter entirely.
