Analysis
Apple is cutting more than 200 jobs across teams responsible for the Siri digital assistant and the Vision Pro headset, Bloomberg reported Friday, with roughly 100 positions eliminated from each group. Apple describes the move as part of an effort to realign its teams to focus on new devices and artificial intelligence, and says it will create new roles alongside the ones being cut.
Vision Pro's gaming and video ambitions get scaled back
Within Vision Pro, the team working on gaming for the headset is being largely shut down, and the group producing its immersive video content is shrinking. Those immersive videos -- the short, cinematic, fully-spatial films Apple has used to showcase the headset -- can cost millions of dollars to produce, and the cuts reflect that the format hasn't proven cost-effective against how few people are actively using Vision Pro day to day. Apple has never disclosed Vision Pro unit sales, but the device has been widely reported to be underperforming Apple's own internal expectations since its 2024 launch, and this is the clearest signal yet that Apple is pulling back specific investment areas rather than simply iterating toward a cheaper future model.
Siri's old guard makes way for the new one
The Siri-side cuts specifically target Apple's Intelligent Systems Experience team, working on the legacy version of the assistant, rather than the rebuilt Siri AI system Apple has in development. That distinction matters: Apple isn't simply shrinking its AI investment, it's actively retiring an older technical architecture in favor of a new one that the company says requires a different kind of engineering expertise -- consistent with reporting that Apple's AI ambitions have progressed more slowly than rivals' like OpenAI and Google, and that the company is now racing to rebuild Siri from a more capable large-language-model foundation rather than patch the existing system.
Where the freed-up investment is likely headed
The cuts land alongside reporting that Apple is shifting priority toward smart glasses, a category where Meta's Ray-Ban line already has a multi-year commercial head start, and where Google and Samsung have both signaled competing hardware. Apple has historically preferred entering categories later with a more polished product rather than first with an early one -- its approach with the original iPhone and iPad -- but smart glasses are unusual in that Meta has already established real consumer habits and a hardware supply chain around the category, narrowing the window for Apple to define the product on its own terms the way it has in past launches.
A 200-person cut is small relative to Apple's roughly 160,000-person global workforce, and Apple's own statement frames this as a reallocation rather than a retreat -- new roles are reportedly opening alongside the ones eliminated. But laying off the immersive-video and gaming teams specifically, rather than trimming headcount evenly across Vision Pro, is a clearer signal than the company's public language suggests: Apple is narrowing what Vision Pro is for, two years after launch, rather than staying the course on the original vision it shipped with.
