Halide’s co-founder is heading back to Apple’s design team

According to 9to5Mac, Halide and Lux co-founder Sebastiaan de With announced he is joining Apple’s human interface design team. This is actually a return for de With, who previously freelanced for Apple on projects like Find My, MobileMe, and iCloud back in the day. His move comes during a significant leadership shakeup: Alan Dye, Apple’s VP of Human Interface Design since 2015, left for Meta in December 2023. Veteran designer Stephen Lemay, with 26 years at Apple, has taken over Dye’s role. Furthermore, CEO Tim Cook has reportedly tasked hardware engineering SVP John Ternus with managing the design teams behind the scenes. De With has also done design work for Sony, Mozilla, Oracle, and HP beyond his own acclaimed apps.

What this move really means

This is a fascinating hire, and not just because de With is a brilliant designer. Anyone who’s used Halide or Lux knows his work is deeply thoughtful, pro-level, yet incredibly intuitive. That’s exactly the kind of DNA Apple‘s design language was built on. But here’s the thing: he’s not joining a static team. He’s walking into an organization that’s clearly in flux.

You’ve got a new VP in Stephen Lemay after nearly a decade under Alan Dye. And then you have John Ternus—the guy many see as Tim Cook’s successor—getting involved in design oversight. That’s huge. It signals that Cook sees design as critically important enough to put a top-tier operations and engineering mind on it. So de With isn’t just filling a seat; he’s part of a potential reinvention, or at least a re-centering, of Apple’s design philosophy.

A return to first principles?

Look, Apple’s software design has faced criticism in recent years. Some say it’s become inconsistent, or overly skeuomorphic in places, or just… messy. Bringing in someone like de With, who comes from the outside but has legacy Apple experience, feels like a play to inject fresh perspective while reconnecting with core principles. He built apps that power users love precisely because they strip away complexity without sacrificing capability. Sound familiar? It should. That’s classic Apple.

Basically, this hire makes me optimistic. It suggests Apple is looking critically at its own design output and is willing to bring in top external talent to fix it. The combination of Lemay’s deep institutional knowledge and de With’s modern, app-driven design sensibility could be really powerful. I’m curious to see where his influence shows up first. The Camera app? System-level UI refinements? Only time will tell, but it’s a move worth watching.