Apple’s AI Pivot Leads to 200+ Job Cuts: Siri and Vision Pro Teams Hit by Restructuring

Apple is the latest big tech firm to join the layoff spree affecting the industry. The Cupertino-based tech titan cut more than 200 employees from its Siri voice assistant, Vision Pro spatial computing headset, and broader artificial intelligence teams, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reported.

The reductions split roughly evenly: approximately 100 positions eliminated from the Vision Pro organisation and another 100 from Siri and related software teams. Apple confirmed the direction of the move in a statement, saying the cuts were made 'to evolve our business to deliver the best experiences for our users.'

'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.'

What the Vision Pro Cuts Actually Eliminated

The Vision Pro, Apple's mixed-reality headset that launched in early 2024 at a starting price of $3,499, was positioned as the company's most ambitious new hardware category in years. The device runs visionOS, Apple's spatial operating system, and was marketed heavily on its ability to deliver immersive video experiences and high-end spatial gaming.

Those are precisely the capabilities now being wound down, affecting about 100 roles within the division. The gaming team is being largely disbanded and the immersive video production unit significantly reduced. Apple is also scaling back its dedicated immersive content production operation, with plans to rely more heavily on third-party creators going forward.

Producing immersive video content at the quality Apple demanded required significant internal resources, and the active user base for the Vision Pro never grew large enough to justify that overhead at scale. The headset, at its price point, remained a product for enthusiasts and enterprise customers rather than a mainstream consumer device.

Apple has not signalled a full retreat from spatial computing. The company is reportedly considering a new Vision Pro model for release as early as 2028, and visionOS will continue to be developed, Bloomberg reported. Resources are being realigned toward other products in the pipeline rather than simply cut from the business. The platform continues, but the teams that built its signature experiences largely do not.

Siri's Architectural Overhaul and the Workers It Left Behind

Apple is rebuilding Siri on an entirely new technical architecture, one designed from the ground up to support more advanced, AI-powered capabilities. That rebuild requires a different set of engineering skills than the ones many of the 100 affected Siri employees brought to the role.

This means Apple is simultaneously eliminating existing positions and creating new ones. The people being let go are not being replaced by fewer workers doing the same job. They are being replaced by different workers doing a fundamentally different job, built around large language model (LLM) integration and more sophisticated natural language processing.

Siri has long been criticised as lagging behind competitors, including Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa, and more recently falling further back relative to the generative AI assistants introduced by OpenAI and Google since 2023. Apple's response has been to pursue a ground-up rebuild rather than iterate on the existing system. It is reported that the architectural change driving the Siri layoffs is directly tied to new AI integrations.

The Human Cost of AI Pivots Across the Industry

What is happening at Apple is not unique to the iPhone maker. Across the American technology industry, companies restructuring around AI have consistently produced a specific type of casualty: the experienced specialist whose skills were built for a prior generation of the technology. From Oracle to Meta and Amazon, there have been thousands of layoffs tied to internal AI automation.

At Apple, that means engineers who built immersive video pipelines for a headset that the market has not yet embraced at scale, and voice assistant developers whose expertise was shaped by the pre-large-language-model era of conversational AI.

Originally published on IBTimes UK