Apple’s iPhone Design Team Receives Financial Boost to Prevent Brain Drain
Working at Apple is probably the dream of many aspiring engineers. Especially when you hear how Jony Ive, who left a few years ago, praises the company culture of the Apple brand. Tim Cook, CEO, even made a statement in a recent interview.
Furthermore, a product designer working for the Cupertino firm is unlikely to end up in the red at the end of the month. The members of the iPhone design team even received a significant financial boost last week.
Apple Goes All Out to Retain Its Employees: Between 200,000 and 400,000 Dollars
Mark Gurman from Bloomberg, always well-informed about what’s going on behind the scenes at Apple, reveals that the members of the iPhone design team recently received restricted stock units valued between 200,000 and 400,000 dollars. They could even increase in value based on Apple’s stock performance.
These awards will vest over a four-year period. Employees must remain with the company during this period to receive the total value. This Apple strategy aims to limit the departure of its employees to competitors like Meta and OpenAI.
The delay by Tim Cook’s company in the AI market is partly responsible for this brain drain. Engineers and designers naturally gravitate towards companies more advanced than Apple in this regard and more financially rewarding. Apple has also raised salaries for its internal team responsible for models in response to competitive offers.
Bloomberg notes that these companies still pay better than Apple despite Cupertino’s efforts to retain its teams. In recent years, OpenAI’s hardware division, partly led by Tang Tan, has managed to poach several dozen Apple employees.
Members of the iPhone design team, as well as those from iPad, Mac, and Apple Watch, have joined Sam Altman’s company. OpenAI and others have paid around 1 million dollars per year in stocks to former Apple engineers to entice them to change roles.
Meta Platforms Inc., on the other hand, offers more than 100 million dollars per year to some of its employees. Even Abidur Chowdhury, the designer of the iPhone Air, left the company at the end of 2025. Much to the dismay of John Ternus, who oversees all material engineering at Apple.
