Apple Cut About 100 Vision Pro Jobs Seven Days Before Its First Live Immersive Baseball Game

Apple cut more than 200 jobs on Friday. Roughly 100 came out of the Vision Products Group, the organization behind Vision Pro and visionOS. The rest hit the Siri team and a software unit called Intelligent Systems Experience, which handles how AI features reach Apple devices. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reported the numbers. Apple confirmed them.

Two groups inside the Vision organization absorbed most of it. Apple largely shut down the team building games for the headset. It also reduced the unit that produces Apple Immersive Video, the 8K 180-degree format Apple has leaned on since launch as the clearest answer to why anyone should strap on a $3,499 computer.

AppleInsider had the first piece of this on Thursday, reporting at least 60 cuts inside the Vision group and describing one VR development team as eliminated outright. Gurman's Friday report is the wider count.

The immersive video cut lands seven days before the broadcast

On August 10 we covered Apple and MLB setting four Friday Night Baseball games for live Apple Immersive Video. The first is August 28, Red Sox at Yankees, 7 p.m. Eastern. Then September 4, September 11, and September 18. Four games, shot in 8K at 180 degrees, directed live.

Apple reduced the team that makes that content eleven days after announcing the slate and seven days before the first game airs. Nothing in Friday's reporting says the pilot is cancelled, and Apple has not touched the schedule. But four games was already a small commitment, and the group responsible for delivering it is smaller today than it was on Thursday.

What Apple actually said

Apple's statement to Bloomberg was that it is working "to evolve our business to deliver the best experiences for our users," adding that "while we will create new roles as part of this change, it will also impact a limited number of existing roles."

The internal message was more specific. Apple told employees Vision Pro and visionOS are not going away. The near-term priority is smart glasses, and per Gurman those glasses will not support immersive video or advanced gaming titles. A new Vision Pro model is still under consideration for as early as the end of 2028. That is more than two years out, which in Apple's own framing makes it a consideration rather than a plan.

This is the same direction, further along

Nothing here reverses course. In June, incoming CEO John Ternus removed every new Vision headset from the roadmap and left two pairs of glasses standing. Three days later Apple announced visionOS 27, which we called polished software for a platform Apple had already stopped building hardware for. In May, Gurman put Vision Pro 2 at least two years out. In July he put Apple's first smart glasses at WWDC 2027.

The staffing now matches the roadmap. Games and immersive video are the two things Vision Pro has that a pair of display glasses will not. Cutting those teams first is exactly what a company does when it has decided the next face computer is glasses.

Apple is not alone in the retreat. Magic Leap cut 193 jobs in July and left the headset business to sell waveguides to other people. Lenovo folded its XR division into AI wearables the same month. Three of the biggest names in the category have moved staff off headsets and toward glasses inside a single quarter.

What it means if you own one

Vision Pro keeps working. visionOS 27 still ships. The August 28 game is still on the calendar. What changes is the rate at which new exclusive content shows up after that, and the honest read is that it slows.

Anyone weighing a Vision Pro at $3,499 should price it as a device whose library grows slowly and whose successor is a 2028 maybe. Anyone buying it specifically for immersive video now has a number to watch. Whether Apple schedules a fifth live game after September 18 will say more about that format's future than any statement the company issues this week.