Sources: Apple is cutting 200+ jobs, including ~100 positions from the Vision Pro unit and another 100 from the Siri team, as it focuses on new devices and AI
Apple Inc. is cutting jobs across teams responsible for the Siri digital assistant and the Vision Pro headset …
BloombergMark Gurman
Context & Ripple Effects
Apple's cuts are rare and targeted by design: the company eliminated a small number of corporate retail roles in 2023 in its first known reductions since the 2022 belt-tightening began, then trimmed about 100 services jobs across Apple Books and News in 2024. The Siri organization has been under restructuring pressure for two years, including the shutdown of a 121-person San Diego annotations team that worked on assistant accuracy.
The difference this time is direction. In April, Apple sent fewer than 200 Siri developers — a group internally labeled a laggard — through a multi-week AI coding bootcamp to retrain them; four months later it is removing roughly 100 Siri roles outright alongside ~100 Vision Pro positions, signaling that retraining has given way to subtraction as the revamp strategy.
First-order effects
About 100 Vision Pro unit employees and about 100 Siri team members lose their roles immediately, with both product organizations shrinking at once rather than one absorbing the other.
The Siri team that was just retrained through the AI coding bootcamp is now being cut down, meaning the remaining developers inherit the revamp with less headcount than the retraining effort assumed.
Second-order effects
Vision Pro's roadmap competes directly with whatever 'new devices' the freed budget funds, so the headset line's pace of iteration depends on whether leadership treats the cut as a trim or a de-prioritization.
Siri's remaining staff face a consolidation of scope similar to what followed the earlier services-group layoffs at Books and News — same output expected from fewer people, raising the bar on what the AI revamp can ship.
Third-order effects
If the pattern holds — retail in 2023, services in 2024, Siri and Vision Pro in 2026 — targeted cuts become a standing tool for rotating capital out of underperforming lines instead of an exceptional event, changing how Apple hardware bets are judged internally.
For the broader market watching Apple's AI position, headcount moving out of Siri and Vision Pro is a readable signal of where the company believes its next platform sits, more legible than any product announcement.
The trend: Apple is shifting from episodic belt-tightening to continuous portfolio pruning, cutting headcount in lagging product lines like Siri and Vision Pro to fund AI and next-generation devices.
Altogether, Apple is eliminating roughly 200 roles. Apple: “As we continue to evolve our business to deliver the best experiences for our users, we are realigning some of our teams.” It adds laid off employees can apply for other roles at Apple.
Apple is making the Siri changes to adjust roles to better meet the needs of the new Siri AI architecture. Apple is making the Intelligence Systems Experience changes to speed up development of new AI features across products.
Maybe an unpopular opinion: I never understood the focus on gaming with this current generation that was clearly not a good fit for it. And it totally makes sense that most Immersive Videos continues outside Apple. So overall pretty good news that they refocus. It's going to b…
BREAKING: Apple is largely eliminating its Vision Pro gaming team, scaling back its Vision Pro immersive video team and cutting jobs across both Siri and its Intelligence Systems Experience team in software engineering. https://www.bloomberg.com/...
Apple is making the Vision Pro related changes to prioritize new types of devices and how people are using the current product, plus to seemingly cut costs. Immersive videos cost millions of dollars per episode to create, while the device hasn't resonated as a gaming machine.
Apple is trying to have external creators/studios etc build the Immersive media ecosystem not Apple Internally. This doesn't signal anything about AVP as a product, they are treating the headset like the AppleTV device instead of Apple as an Immersive content studio