The guy who designed many of Apple’s iconic Macs will now be building Tesla vehicles

(Also on 9to5mac)

Chris Lattner isn’t the only high profile Apple executive who departed for Tesla over the past month, rather than sticking around to work on Titan. Electrek has learned that Matt Casebolt, a high-profile Senior Director of Design for Apple’s Mac lineup left the company last month for a role at Tesla as Sr. Director Engineering, Closures & Mechanisms. A job meant for a man named Casebolt…

Over the past two and a half years Casebolt was a Design Director of the MacBook Pro with its stand out Touch Bar feature. Before that. he led the team working on the iconic trash can Mac Pro and previously was instrumental, so to speak, in the design of the first generations of MacBook Air. These are some of Apple’s most iconic Mac products over the past decade.

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.

More recently, Tesla snagged Apple’s Reliability Director to scale up production with iPhone-like dependability and the automaker’s new Head of Communications was also poached from Apple’s PR team. Casebolt and Lattner appear to be the latest examples of the so-called “poaching war” between the automaker and the consumer electronic giant, which Tesla appears to be winning.

The departure follows reports of exodus and downsizing in the wake of de-prioritization of the Macintosh groups at Apple.

Casebolt is listed on at least 52 patents at Apple.