Apple cuts 200 jobs as it pivots away from Vision Pro toward smart glasses and AI
Apple is laying off more than 200 employees across its Vision Pro and Siri teams, a move that signals a clear shift away from expensive VR hardware and toward AI and lighter wearables. Bloomberg (Mark Gurman) broke the story on August 21, 2026, confirming the cuts and an Apple statement saying the changes will help the company "evolve its business" while creating new roles alongside the losses.
The cuts
Roughly 100 positions are going from the Vision Pro group. Apple is shutting down its Vision Pro gaming division entirely and pulling back from immersive video production — a category where individual titles cost millions to make for a headset that retails at $3,699 and has a tiny installed base. The other ~100 cuts hit Siri and the Intelligent Systems Experience team, the group responsible for weaving AI into Apple's devices.
Apple confirmed the layoffs but declined to give a location-by-location breakdown. The company said new hires in AI and machine learning will follow, pointing to where engineering resources are actually heading.
What's behind the pivot
The Vision Pro gaming closure makes financial sense once you look at the numbers. At $3,699, the headset costs roughly 12 times more than Meta's $299 smart glasses — a product that already has real consumer traction. Producing exclusive immersive content at scale for a niche device was always a fragile bet, and Apple appears to have decided it's not worth sustaining.
The Siri restructure tells a separate but related story. The existing voice-assistant architecture was built for a different era of AI. Rebuilding it on a new technical foundation — one suited to generative AI — requires a different set of engineering skills, which explains the personnel changes rather than simple headcount reduction.
Where Apple is heading
The Next Web frames Apple's next move as a push into smart glasses, a category where Meta and EssilorLuxottica are already established at a far lower price point. Apple has not announced a product, a price, or a timeline — so any competition in that space remains speculative for now.
What's clear is that spatial computing, as Apple defined it with Vision Pro, is cooling fast. The company is reallocating talent toward generative AI interfaces and a lighter form factor that hasn't been revealed yet. For anyone who bought a Vision Pro, or was considering one, the message from Cupertino is harder to read than it should be.