Apple’s recent Vision Pro layoffs reached further across the company than initially disclosed, according to Bloomberg News’ Mark Gurman.
Last month, Gurman reported that Apple cut about 100 jobs from the Vision Products Group, largely by shutting down the headset’s gaming team and shrinking the unit that produces immersive video. Combined with reductions on Siri and related software teams, the changes affected more than 200 people. Apple said it was realigning teams to focus on new devices and AI, while creating some new roles and offering affected employees a chance to apply elsewhere.
Gurman now says the cuts also hit Vision Pro-related staff in other parts of Apple, including device security, audio engineering, Siri integration, testing, and visionOS. Because visionOS is expected to underpin upcoming smart glasses as well as the headset, the broader reductions affect shared software rather than Vision Pro hardware alone.
According to Gurman, the company has told employees that Vision Pro and visionOS are not going away. A redesigned successor, internally known as N224, is still not expected before late 2028. Near-term emphasis has shifted to AI wearables, including smart glasses code-named N50 that remain on track for next year. Those glasses are not expected to support the same immersive video or advanced gaming experiences as the current headset.
The moves follow the June departure of Paul Meade, who led Vision Pro and smart glasses work before leaving for OpenAI. People inside the Vision organization have spent months urging new CEO John Ternus to keep investing in the platform even as sales lag, Gurman reports. Colleagues who have discussed the headset with Ternus say he was skeptical from the start that a bulky, expensive enclosed device could reach a mass market. He is still said to support the glasses project, but Gurman reports he would consider walking away from head-worn devices as a category if they fail to catch on.
Apple has described the changes as limited and tied to evolving product priorities. Vision Pro launched in 2024 as the company’s spatial-computing flagship but never became a high-volume product, constrained by price and form factor. In-house immersive videos can cost millions to produce and have not proven cost-effective given relatively small active use. Apple now plans fewer internal productions and more third-party content.
MacDailyNews Take: Vision Pro should never have shipped in its initial or present form and it never would have shipped under Steve Jobs or, it sounds like, under John Ternus.
[This] is exactly what you’d expect to occur when a product is released too early to average users… Apple Vision Pro is a devkit for developers, not for average users, and should have been released as a devkit for developers. – MacDailyNews, March 26, 2024
As we wrote on March 22nd:
There are a lot of people inside and outside of Apple who think the company should have waited on the Vision Pro, but it’s fairly easy today to see why Tim Cook released this beta (alpha?) devkit: He likely knew last year, or had a strong inkling, that Project Titan was a goner and there wasn’t much excitement in Apple’s pipeline. He’d need something to point to as “innovation” while he continued on his seemingly unending quest to iterate and monetize products invented by Steve Jobs’ Apple (a very different place) while continuing Apple’s retail store buildout. He also needed something to energize developers and, who knows, they might come up with a killer visionOS app while Apple toils on the long road to real lightweight spatial computing glasses and beyond.
More importantly, Apple last year had already come to the sad realization that they’d missed the generative artificial intelligence revolution and would need a distraction while they feverishly scrambled to catch up (the fruits of which — alongside what sound like disappointing partnerships which hopefully, somehow, preserve user privacy — we’ll hopefully begin to see at WWDC this June).
You have to feel for Cook. After a decade plus of being able to iterate and monetize Jobs’ inspired products and services and continue adding retail stores around the world to spectacular effect, and being lauded for it, he now finds himself in a place that requires actual vision to be able to see which path to take. And he’s not the guy. Even the guy who put him in the position knew it.
Tim’s not a product person, per se. – Steve Jobs
See also:
• Contrary to popular belief, Steve Jobs knew about Apple Watch – February 13, 2023
• Work on Apple Vision Pro began under Steve Jobs – August 23, 2023
Beyond the fact that Cook can’t even execute a compelling live keynote address, his big send off, the “Apple Car,” [the idea of which was also germinated under Jobs] fizzled in ignominious failure.
See also:
• Scrapped Apple Car ‘a massive disappointment that will alter the course of the company’s history, perhaps for decades to come’ – Gurman – March 11, 2024
• Apple employees referred to doomed Apple Car project as ‘The Titanic Disaster’ – February 29, 2024
So, despite myriad misgivings and protestations inside Apple, Cook pulled the trigger early on the Vision Pro. He had to have something to point to that would buy him some time. Even Apple’s rubber-stamping board of lackeys would wake up and start asking questions otherwise.
While Cook is hemming and hawing when faced with shareholders (virtually, of course, never again in person for as long as Cook remains), Apple is currently in scramble mode trying to catch up to rivals in generative AI, a technology the company seems to have completely missed while focusing instead on the not-ready-for-primetime Apple Vision Pro, visionOS, its now-canceled decade-long multi-billion-dollar electric vehicle boondoggle, replacing leather in iPhone cases and Apple Watch bands with overpriced junk in a quest to “save the planet,” forcing employees to endure a constant barrage of time-wasting zero-productivity DEI sessions, and myriad other various and sundry “initiatives” which Cook deems of import. – MacDailyNews, February 28, 2024
When you lose your visionary CEO and replace him with a caretaker CEO, this is the type of aimless, late, bureaucratic dithering that ensues. – MacDailyNews, November 21, 2017
Thankfully, blessedly, today is finally a Brand New Day for Apple!
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