Bye Bye Alan Dye

December 5, 2025

I was trying to get something down about Alan Dye leaving Apple, but John Gruber got there first and has done a much better job.

I’ve grumbled several times in the past about the new Liquid Glass redesign, but it’s just the latest push in a direction I’ve been unhappy with for years. Like Gruber, my biggest gripes have been with macOS. The sharp edges have literally been filed off. The UI keeps being “decluttered” of useful UI, which is hidden behind mouse-overs or “⋯” menus. Things are being given more “room to breathe”, even in situations where information density is helpful. And now, with Tahoe, everything’s covered in distracting glass and blur effects.

All of this happened under Dye’s leadership, and now Dye is being replaced by Stephen Lemay. Lemay has been at Apple since 1999, but hasn’t been in the spotlight until now. In his piece, Gruber raised some good questions about this choice.

What I struggled with in the wake of today’s news is how to square the following contradiction:

• Dye apparently left for Meta on his own; he wasn’t squeezed out.
• Apple replacing Dye with Lemay seemingly signals a significant shift in direction, replacing a guy whose approach was almost entirely superficial/visual with a guy who’s spent his entire career sweating actual interaction details.

If Apple’s senior leadership would have been happy to have Dye remain as leader of Apple’s software design teams, why didn’t they replace him with a Dye acolyte? Conversely, if the decision makers at Apple saw the need for a directional change, why wasn’t Dye pushed out?

The answer, I think, is that the decision to elevate Lemay wasn’t about direction, but loyalty. Why risk putting in a Dye-aligned replacement when that person might immediately get poached too?

I don’t know if this is the reason, but it makes sense. It also scares me a little. It implies that Apple execs were either supportive of the current design trends, or (best case) they didn’t really care.

Here’s a more hopeful take: maybe Lemay has been grumbling about these changes for a while, too. Maybe some of these grumbles have made it to the ears of the execs. And maybe, just maybe, Tim Cook has seen a dip in his coveted “customer sat” numbers based on Liquid Glass pushback. Cook doesn’t strike me as a design critic, but I know he’s driven by numbers. It’s a small sample, but the general sentiment around Liquid Glass on Bluesky is not good. Maybe this was enough for Cook to want to change things up. Maybe. I’m going to cling to this hope while I grit my teeth through Tahoe and the next OS update or two.