Apple’s longtime software design chief Alan Dye is leaving for Meta to become chief design officer. He helped shape the look of iOS, watchOS, Vision Pro, and major hardware over nearly two decades at Apple.
Soon after the news broke, a meme from the r/Mac community started to spread. It paired a famous design quote with a jab at Meta’s products and quickly racked up tens of thousands of upvotes on Reddit.
A Jobs Quote Turned Into A Roast
The meme riffs on Steve Jobs’s line: “Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”
While Meta celebrates the hire, many Apple fans are not exactly cheering for Meta. On Reddit, users welcomed Dye’s exit from Apple but joked that they look forward to “not using anything he designs at Meta.” Others say that everything Meta designs is already bad, so he will fit right in.
Several comments called Meta’s products some of the worst interfaces in mainstream tech. People pointed to Facebook and Instagram as examples of cluttered layouts, buried settings, and endless experiments that treat the UI itself like a test lab. One user compared the experience to learning rigid green-screen workflows by rote, not through intuitive design.
Meta’s UI Reputation Takes Center Stage
From there, the thread widens into a broader rant about social platforms. People describe Facebook’s interface as cluttered, confusing, and constantly changing in ways that hide settings and controls. They say the feed feels like a spilled box of toothpicks, with features thrown in at random.
Readers also compare Meta’s design problems with the messy dashboards of cloud platforms, arguing that bad interface decisions have become normal across the industry.
Meta wants Apple design talent
Inside Meta, the hire signals something bigger. The company is pouring money into AI hardware, smart glasses, and spatial computing, and it wants those products to look as considered as Apple’s best work. Not to mention, Meta has been poaching Apple’s top talents continuously for the past months allegedly for the design improvements and its Superintelligence team.
Meta has already shipped multiple generations of Ray-Ban smart glasses and continues to invest in Reality Labs, even as costs stay high and public patience runs thin. Bringing in a designer who helped define modern Apple software is a clear attempt to reset how Meta products feel in your hand and on your face.
At Apple, critics say Dye’s tenure pushed software toward flashy effects and away from simple, intuitive controls, especially with the Liquid Glass look in iOS 26.
The real question is: will this change make Facebook, Instagram, and future Meta devices nicer to use? On paper, Meta now has one of Apple’s most experienced designers guiding its look and feel. In practice, design wins only stick when leadership backs them and resists clutter for the sake of more taps and scrolls.
For now, users seem skeptical but curious. Many believe Meta “needs all the help it can get,” and they see Dye’s move as a rare chance for the company to rethink its entire visual language. If future Meta apps feel calmer, clearer, and less exhausting, this hire will look like a turning point. If not, people will have plenty more memes ready.
