Apple confirmed on Friday that it had cut more than 200 jobs across its Vision Products Group, Siri, and Intelligent Systems Experience teams, with roughly 100 positions gone from the Vision Pro organization and another 100 from Siri and adjacent software groups. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, who broke the numbers, reported that the gaming team inside Vision Pro is being largely shut down and the immersive video unit sharply reduced. AppleInsider had surfaced about 60 of the Vision-related cuts a day earlier.

The framing employees received is more telling than the headcount. According to MacRumors’ Juli Clover, Vision Pro staff were told Apple is realigning priorities based on how customers actually use the device. Translation: immersive video hasn’t worked out. The flagship productions cost millions of dollars to film, and too few people wear the headset for that math to close.

So Apple is doing what Apple does when a bet underperforms. It’s not killing the product. It’s quietly rewriting the ambition.

Vision Pro and visionOS survive. A new model is still rumored for 2028. But Bloomberg reports the company will lean on third-party 3D content instead of financing its own cinematic pipeline, and the AI smart glasses expected in 2027 won’t support 3D gaming or video at all. That last detail is the strategic tell. The next hardware cycle isn’t a spatial-computing cycle; it’s a wearable-AI cycle, and the teams being kept are the ones that map to glasses, not goggles.

The Siri reshuffle sits inside the same logic. Bloomberg ties those cuts to an upcoming AI-infused Siri built on a new technical architecture, which requires different expertise than the one being let go. The Intelligent Systems Experience group is being reorganized alongside it. AppleInsider notes a new CEO will be in place soon, giving the reorg a convenient before-and-after boundary.

Apple’s on-record statement, that the cuts are meant “to evolve our business to deliver the best experiences for our users,” and its assurance that affected staff can apply internally, is standard narrative management. The 2024 launch pitch treated Vision Pro as the beginning of a new computing era. Eighteen months later, it’s a research platform with a smaller crew and a cheaper content strategy.

Sources