Apple has laid off more than 200 employees from the Siri and Vision Pro teams, almost completely shutting down its gaming area and reducing immersive content creation. The company justifies the change as an evolution to improve the user experience, but the expensive $3,499 headset has not been commercially successful. For the public, this means Apple is prioritizing more popular products like smart glasses while abandoning expensive and unprofitable projects. The cuts reflect a shift toward what actually sells, leaving doubts about the future of virtual reality.
The technical strategy: prioritizing lightweight software over heavy hardware 🎯
The layoffs are concentrated in the teams that developed games for visionOS and those responsible for recording immersive content for the headset. Apple maintains the core of Siri but redirects engineers toward artificial intelligence features for its smart glasses, a market with higher sales volume. The technical decision involves abandoning the development of complex spatial applications and focusing on low-cost integrations with the existing ecosystem. This reduces the maintenance burden of the headset's operating system and frees up resources for projects with immediate returns, such as mid-range headphones.
The $3,499 headset: a paperweight with a luxury screen 💸
It turns out that the future of spatial computing weighed too heavily on customers' wallets. Apple has discovered that people prefer to spend 300 euros on glasses that notify them of alerts rather than mortgaging themselves for glasses that block their view of the living room. The 200 laid-off employees could take comfort in thinking that at least they will no longer have to explain to their families why they worked on a product that nobody buys. That said, virtual reality is not dead: it is just in a price-induced coma.