Rare $400K Designer Bonuses
Apple handed iPhone product-design teams unusually large RSU bonuses—reports say awards reach up to $400,000—to blunt poaching by AI firms and retain critical hardware and systems talent. The move reportedly extends across silicon, hardware, software, and ops groups and vests over four years, signaling how costly retention is getting in the AI hiring war. (macrumors.com)
Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman published the first account of the grants on March 26, 2026, citing people with knowledge of the awards; Apple declined to comment to reporters. (bloomberg.com) Bloomberg reported OpenAI’s hardware arm — run in part by former Apple engineer Tang Tan — has hired “several dozen” Apple engineers and has been a major source of external recruiting pressure. (bloomberg.com) The piece names Rich Dinh as the current head of Apple’s iPhone product design organization and places that group under hardware chief John Ternus. (bloomberg.com) Sources told Bloomberg that some competing offers from AI startups can reach roughly $1 million in stock per engineer in a year, a compensation scale the report contrasts with Apple’s equity awards. (bloomberg.com) Contemporaneous reporting shows Apple has used similar out-of-cycle RSU refreshes before: late 2021 and March 2022 rounds targeted silicon, hardware and ops engineers and were reported at up to roughly $180,000–$200,000. (macrumors.com) Bloomberg also highlighted new entrants such as Figure AI’s Hark and named hires from Apple — including designer Abidur Chowdhury and engineers Jack McCambridge and Alex Gould — as examples of the broader talent flow to device-focused startups. (bloomberg.com) Gurman’s report frames the awards as out-of-cycle stock grants separate from Apple’s routine compensation programs and notes the final payout sizes depend on Apple’s stock performance. (bloomberg.com)
