Apple Vision Pro and Software Layoffs
In addition to cutting dozens of Vision Pro employees who worked on features like immersive video and gaming, Apple is laying off people who worked on Siri and AI, reports Bloomberg.
Apple is “largely shutting down” the Vision Pro team focused on gaming, and it is paring down the team that makes immersive video content. Approximately 100 employees who were part of the Vision Products Group have been laid off, with Apple also cutting 100 people from its Siri and software groups.
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Despite the cuts to the Vision Products Group, employees were told that the Vision Pro and visionOS operating system are not being eliminated.
Apple told Bloomberg that it was realigning some teams in order to “evolve” the business to provide the best experience for users. “While we will create new roles as part of this change, it will also impact a limited number of existing roles,” Apple said.
The job cuts are tiny in relation to the overall company, which had 166,000 full time employees in September 2025 (the last time Apple disclosed its headcount). But as John Ternus prepares to take the CEO job just over one week from now, the timing seems designed to get some unpleasant work out of the way and let the new boss come in with clean hands.
It’s hard to find good people, Apple has plenty of work that needs doing, and it just reported a record quarter. Maybe they don’t need more immersive video content, but it’s not clear to me why the other employees couldn’t be reassigned. And I’m really wondering what’s going on with the general software group, where they’re getting rid of legends like Keith Stattenfield:
So, I posted yesterday on an another place that I had been just laid off at Apple after 37 years. ( Surprise! I got laid off. It was unexpected. I am still coming to terms with it. Yes, I will be ok. ) And I mentioned some of the things I’d done, and mused that I’d thought I’d finish out my career in a few years having passed along the knowledge to younger engineers. Alas, that’s going to get left unfinished.
I felt much the same way, because I’d also hoped to slowly ease into retirement instead of being given options that led me to retire a few years early.
Laying off anyone working on anything related to Apple Vision Pro is a gross strategic blunder, because it signals a lack of confidence in the product. Put them to work fixing bug backlogs if you don’t want them working on what they were doing, but don’t lay them off and let that show up in the press, that’s fucking amateur hour shit.
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And the same goes for the Software Engineering layoffs, which don’t seem to be reported much upon because the layoffs have been described as “Apple Vision Pro, Siri, and software” where perhaps people don’t get that the latter is how Apple refers to the Software Engineering (SWE) org. There are so many bugs that should be fixed, that users encounter in their everyday lives, just reassign people to work on them. It’s stupid to lay people off when they could do that.
Plus, maybe retaining that institutional knowledge would help forestall future bugs.
Previously:
- Apple’s Q3 2026 Results
- Giving Up on the Vision Pro
- John Ternus Replaces Tim Cook
- AI Layoffs
- Why Apple Still Hasn’t Cracked AI
- Apple Shifts Siri From Giannandrea to Rockwell
- Apple Books Layoffs
- Apple Cancels Car Project
- Thank You, Sal
Update (2026-08-25): Louie Mantia:
Laying off employees who were working on a product that largely “failed” in the market is extremely hurtful to those employees, because the product’s failure is not their fault. They were directed to do that work. Apple should find new places for every single one of the employees who worked on Vision Pro. They owe it to the people who they directed to work toward the goal of making and maintaining Vision Pro. They can afford to do that.
Apple didn’t even work that hard to take care of the iPod employees who were once half the company’s revenue. In the end they basically gave Nest a free engineering team.
Update (2026-08-28): See also: ArsTechnica.
Update (2026-09-02): Hartley Charlton:
Recent layoffs of Apple employees working on the Vision Pro were broader than previously thought, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reports.
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Gurman reports that people inside the Vision Pro group have spent months lobbying new CEO John Ternus to stay the course on the platform even as sales continue to underwhelm. Colleagues who have discussed the headset with Ternus say he was skeptical of it from the start, seeing it as too bulky and too costly to reach a mass audience.
Interestingly, since visionOS apparently runs on Apple’s upcoming smart glasses, the wider layoffs impact software shared across both product lines rather than the headset alone.
I was recently informed that I am being laid off from my position at Apple. It was unexpected, especially coming right after WWDC, where several of the projects I led and features I contributed to were announced.
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You can find my resume here.
Previously:
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Apple Vision Pro was literally the dumbest "platform" product Apple has ever made, and canning it is probably the first smart thing they've done with regards to it.
Making a high end headset that is a self-contained device (a platform), rather than a peripheral for other devices is a "nuts & gum, together at last" level act of stupidity. It ensures your expensive optics remain welded to a rapidly obsolescing low end graphics / processing platform (note no trade-ins offered on the first gen AVP when they released the update).
It's the self-contained and rapid obsolescence of Meta headsets, without the low price or light weight, combined with the expense and heavy optics of professional headsets, without the future-proofing, massive graphics horsepower, and absolute precision of lighthouse tracking, of being a (tethered) workstation display peripheral. Nuts and Gum, together at last.
Its effect is divisive with regards to your existing devices - it doesn't make your Mac better, it doesn't make your iPhone better, it's an additional mediocrity-limited peer to them... like the iPad's half-baked sidecar feature which can't be an ordinary (screenless) graphics tablet for a Mac, and instead has to be a janky faux Cintiq.
Apple made a headset that did none of the things well that people were actually using headset computing to do, which is kindof typical of their arrogance.
The Vision Pro is a weird niche product, but it's one of the few Apple products where its software is actually fine. It's stable and fast. Firing the people who made it instead of reassigning them to work on all the broken software Apple has elsewhere is absolutely incompetent behavior.
@Plume "The Vision Pro is […] one of the few Apple products where its software is actually fine. It's stable and fast."
It's backed by which data? Because, considering that there are a limited number of people actually using this product and way less 3rd party developers targeting this device, I have doubts about the "fine", "stable" and "fast" adjectives because with a limited audience, the perceived picture about the quality/stability/performance of a device or development environment can be wrong.
VisionOS is incredibly cool software literally weighed down by untenable hardware. I want to see it (and other VR tech) survive to thrive on less cumbersome hardware. The future of mixed reality cannot be Meta’s to ruin a second time with its sleazy glasses.
It seems to me the comments here are missing the headline - they laid off Keith Stattenfield. This is a complete own goal, and has absolutely nothing to do with Vision Pro. They should be making him an Apple Fellow, instead they just unceremoniously push him out the door. Might as well officially remove AppleScript and Apple Events, because for sure there will never be another bug fix on this code. And if they let Keith go, I'm sure there are other dumb layoffs in this batch. We have plenty of other evidence, but this clearly shows that the decision process at Apple is horribly broken. But hey - they saved the salary of a few engineers. Good thing all of Apple's operating systems are rock solid and they have a good handle on all the bug reports..
This makes me actually mad. With all the bugs and all the poor quality software releases, why are they firing people who colleagues say were bright spots at the company? Why are they dumping institutional knowledge? This is such a slap in the face to those workers and us users who rely on their work
I don’t know anything about any of the people they laid off but if you really need to get rid of software engineers maybe umm…look at the SwiftUI team.
I think you're both right. The software is probably good, the people I've talked to that've used it said so, but they only tried the demo in an Apple Shop.
But I also think keeping software smooth and clean is much easier at the beginning, before feature creep sets in. Getting rid of devs is probably because Claude Code. Getting rid of institutional knowledge is stupid though. Maybe even ageist, but looking at the top brass of apple they seem to fully embrace senior citizens so perhaps not.
Keith Stattenfield work has touched hundreds of millions, if not billions of people. His contributions to the Mac are monumental. It should be headline news, not just in the Apple world, but industry wide that apple have laid off Keith.
Tonight I spoke to one of the engineers laid off by Apple. He said that they laid off about 80 people that were NOT part of the Vision Pro or Siri groups. That's a pretty significant number. I'm so glad that all the bugs are fixed and everything is smooth sailing in the Apple software development world.
Stattenfield alone is worth at least half the number of executives at Apple. What a tragedy, to put it mildly.
Interesting, just found this on the Ars Technica forums. Apparently the Apple layoffs were big enough to necessitate a WARN filing: https://layoffdata.com/company/apple/
California's own requirements for Cal-WARN state that this advance notice must be given when a company of 75+ employees lays off 50 or more personnel within 30 days.
Apple already runs a shoestring operation to "be more like a startup" and it shows in software quality. Can they really afford to dump 75 engineers including some really notable ones?
Well, you know, if you have to give your CEO $58 million, that money has to come from somewhere. By firing these people, Apple saved over $20 million a year! These fired people should be happy and proud that they contributed to ensuring their former new CEO doesn't have to live in abject poverty.
