Alan Dye Was in Tim Cook’s Blind Spot

Thursday, 4 December 2025

NBC News, back in March 2018:

Speaking at a town hall event hosted by MSNBC’s Chris Hayes and Recode’s Kara Swisher, Cook said Facebook put profits above all else when it allegedly allowed user data to be taken through connected apps. [...]

When asked what he would do if he were in Zuckerberg’s position, Cook replied: “What would I do? I wouldn’t be in this situation.”

“The truth is we could make a ton of money if we monetized our customer, if our customer was our product,” Cook said. “We’ve elected not to do that.”

“Privacy to us is a human right. It’s a civil liberty, and something that is unique to America. This is like freedom of speech and freedom of the press,” Cook said. “Privacy is right up there with that for us.”

Perhaps Cook now needs to define “us”.

This was a rather memorable interview. Cook’s “What would I do? I wouldn’t be in this situation” is one of the stone-coldest lines he’s ever zinged at a rival company. (In public, that is.) That was just ice cold. Cook is a consummate diplomat. Most non-founder big company CEOs are. Satya Nadella, Sundar Pichai, Andy Jassy — none of them are known for throwing shade, let alone sharp elbows, at competitors. Cook has made an exception, multiple times, when it comes to Facebook/Meta (and to a lesser degree, Google).

So it’s not just that Alan Dye jumped ship from Apple for the chief designer officer role at another company.¹ It’s not just that he left for a rival company. It’s that he left Apple for Meta, of all companies. Given what Cook has said about Meta publicly, one can only imagine what he thinks about them privately. Apple executives tend to stay at Apple. The stability of its executive team is unparalleled. But Dye is a senior leader who not only left for a rival, but the one rival that Cook and the rest of Apple’s senior leadership team consider the most antithetical to Apple’s ideals.

It would have been surprising if Dye had jumped ship to Google or Microsoft. It would have been a little more surprising if he’d left for Amazon, if only because Amazon seemingly places no cultural value whatsoever on design, as Apple practices it. But maybe with Amazon it would have been seen as Andy Jassy deciding to get serious about design, and thus, in a way, less surprising after the fact. But leaving Apple for Meta, of all companies, feels shocking. How could someone who would even consider leaving Apple for Meta rise to a level of such prominence at Apple, including as one of the few public faces of the company?

So it’s not just that Alan Dye is a fraud of a UI designer and leader, and that Apple’s senior leadership had a blind spot to the ways Dye’s leadership was steering Apple’s interface design deeply astray. That’s problem enough, as I emphasized in my piece yesterday. It’s also that it’s now clear that Dye’s moral compass was not aligned with Apple’s either. Tim Cook and the rest — or at least most? — of Apple’s senior leadership apparently couldn’t see that, either.