Apple laid off around 100 staff working on Vision Pro, including “largely shutting down” the spatial gaming team and downsizing the immersive video team, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reported.
Gurman reported the layoffs in a series of two reports near the end of August. In the second report, he said the layoffs also affected some people working on headset security, spatial audio engineering, spatial Siri integration, and visionOS itself.
Apple provided an official statement to Bloomberg when asked about the layoffs:
“While we will create new roles as part of this change, it will also impact a limited number of existing roles”
“We are grateful to these team members for their contributions, and we are committed to supporting them throughout their transition, including opportunities to apply for other roles at Apple.”
David Heaney
However, this does not mean that Apple is exiting the VR/MR space.
According to Gurman, Apple executives told staff that Vision Pro headsets and the visionOS operating system are not going away.
The shutdown of Apple’s spatial gaming unit, Gurman explains, is due to the fact that the device is rarely used for gaming. Vision Pro does have support for PlayStation VR2 controllers, but the $250 addon hasn’t seen much uptake among owners, and only a tiny fraction of VR games are available natively on visionOS. It’s just not what people use Vision Pro for in practice.
Meanwhile, the reduction in the immersive video team is related to the extreme cost of producing each video relative to the number of Vision Pro owners. Each episode can cost millions of dollars to make, and third-party creators are now leveraging Blackmagic’s immersive camera and DaVinci Resolve’s support for the format to build out a content ecosystem without Apple.
David Heaney
Gurman also reiterated his claim from his May report that the company is still working on a “slimmer and lighter” headset to succeed Vision Pro that could launch in late 2028. But if the wider headset market, such as Meta’s next headset, hasn’t gained traction by then, the new CEO John Ternus is “open” to canceling the device. Executives below Ternus have been trying to convince him to continue investing in visionOS, Gurman writes, with a view to the longer-term potential of the platform.
Apple’s primary wearable focus remains its upcoming screenless smart glasses, intended to take on Meta Glasses and Ray-Ban Meta next year.
I’m back writing on UploadVR again (for real this time), and this article is part of a series rounding up what happened in XR over the summer.
