Former Apple Design Director Matt Casebolt Joins Tesla Motors

Yesterday, Apple’s Director of Developer Tools and the creator of programming language Swift Chris Lattner announced his departure from the company and today, Electrek is reporting that Matt Casebolt, a Senior Director of Design for Apple’s Mac lineup has left the company to join Tesla Motors as Sr. Director Engineering, Closures & Mechanisms. Casebolt is also credited with designing the new MacBook Pro’s Touch Bar feature.

At Tesla, Casebolt will be joining a growing hoard of Apple Alumni including former VP of Mac Hardware Engineering Doug Field who is the Sr. VP of Vehicle Engineering at Tesla. At Apple, where he was VP of Hardware Engineering, Field may have crossed paths with Casebolt as well. In fact, the halls of Tesla are probably starting to feel like the good ol’ days at Apple.

Casebolt is known for leading the team that worked on designing the iconic Mac Pro, and was also instrumental in designing of the first generations of MacBook Air, both of which have turned out to be Apple’s most iconic Mac products over the past decade. He is listed on at least 52 patents at Apple as well.

In addition to Casebolt, Tesla has recently poached Apple’s Reliability Director to scale up production, while its new Head of Communications was also snagged from Apple’s PR team.