Apple has conceded that the Vision Pro's flagship content bet — the immersive video and …

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Apple has conceded that the Vision Pro’s flagship content bet — the immersive video and spatial gaming that were supposed to justify a $3,500 headset — failed, and it is dismantling the teams that built them. Bloomberg reports Apple is “largely shutting down” the Vision Pro gaming team and paring back the immersive video unit, laying off roughly 100 people from the Vision Products Group and another 100 from its Siri and software groups. The cuts are a quiet admission that the most expensive bet Apple placed on spatial computing did not survive contact with actual customers.

The math is brutal and specific. Apple’s immersive videos — the 180-degree, 8K productions shot with custom camera rigs, from the MLS season to the “Alicia Keys: Rehearsal Room” specials — can cost millions of dollars to film. The audience for them is the small minority of the small number of Vision Pro owners who use the device at all. When millions of dollars of content is consumed by tens of thousands of people, the cost per view is unsupportable, and Apple told affected employees it is realigning priorities based on how customers actually use the device. The plan now is to produce fewer videos in-house and lean on third-party 3D content — the cheapest possible version of the original strategy.

The company insists the product line survives. Employees were told the Vision Pro and visionOS are not being eliminated, and the wording matters: Apple is not killing the hardware, it is killing the reason anyone was supposed to want it. The device that remains is a developer platform and a niche productivity tool, not the entertainment console its creators envisioned.

The Siri cuts are the other half of the same story, and they are not a retreat but a pivot. Apple is eliminating roughly 100 roles in Siri and software groups while creating new positions focused on “Siri AI” — the company’s shorthand for moving Siri onto large language models after years of missing the generative AI moment. This is the second major Siri reshuffle Apple has attempted since it reorganized around the AI effort last year, and it carries the same risk every such move does: laying off the people who know the current stack while promising that replacement talent will materialize. The affected employees are being offered the standard chance to apply for other roles inside the company.

The through-line is that Apple is consciously reallocating from a failed hardware bet to a software-AI bet it cannot afford to lose. The company is one of the few giants with essentially no revenue from generative AI, and the Vision Pro content operation was a luxury it could no longer justify in the same era that Anthropic is preparing a blockbuster public listing and Broadcom is loading up on debt to feed AI infrastructure. Apple’s version of the AI supercycle is defensive: cut the expensive experiments, concentrate what remains on Siri and on the AI smart glasses it expects to ship in 2027.

That last detail is the one to watch. Apple’s glasses, expected in 2027, will reportedly not support 3D gaming or video — the two features being cut today. In other words, Apple is walking away from the spatial content business in one form factor precisely so it can chase a glasses product that deliberately excludes spatial content. The company has effectively decided that the future of its spatial computing ambitions is a lightweight, AI-first glasses device that competes on Siri’s capabilities, not on immersive spectacle, against Meta’s Ray-Ban line and whatever Google and Samsung ship.

So the decision that matters is not whether the Vision Pro survives — it does, as a husk of its former ambition. The decision that matters is whether the 2027 glasses can finally make Apple’s AI stack good enough to carry a product, because the content that was supposed to carry the headset is gone. That is the whole bet now, and Apple has no third pillar left to fall back on. Apple Guts Vision Pro Gaming and Immersive Video Teams, Trims Siri Staff

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Linux 7.2 · Source Linux 7.2 shipped on schedule as the second-busiest cycle ever, behind only 6.7, with cache-aware scheduling, MGLRU improvements, sched_ext sub-schedulers, and automatic multi-size transparent hugepages. Igalia’s DRM scheduler fair-policy work had to land as opt-in after an rc7 regression, keeping FIFO as default, while Raspberry Pi 4 and 5 GPUs finally got runtime power management and a 14-year-old futex robust-list corruption bug was fixed. A full-cycle cadence this dense is now the baseline. The scheduler regression shows GPU fairness still is not ready for primetime, but the kernel is clearly absorbing AI-era workloads.

In Brief

• TikTok agreed to pay $400 million to settle the DOJ’s child-privacy lawsuit. (Source)
• An Anna’s Archive volunteer argues AI companies are destroying physical books and that rare titles need digitizing before they are lost. (Source)
• Walmart ended years of resistance and will finally accept Apple Pay and Google Pay, starting the rollout now. (Source)
• A study of 27,000 Chinese students found AI tools lifted homework scores 18% while exam scores dropped 20%. (Source)
• A researcher’s DNS hijacking experiment accidentally logged phone calls placed to military bases. (Source)
• An Ohio grand jury declined to indict a man charged with felony vandalism for destroying a Flock camera. (Source)
• Kagi added a setting to strip paywalled links from results, plus controls to fully disable AI features in search. (Source)
• Khosla Ventures is backing Discovery Loop, a science-automation startup from ex-Google leaders including Jeff Dean. (Source)
• A stealth reasoning model called Ox Alpha appeared on OpenRouter, aimed at coding and sustained agentic work. (Source)
• Thomas Ptacek argues even the smallest personal tools deserve real native UIs instead of TUI ports. (Source)
• Cloudflare’s new Bot Preference Sync lets a site set one bot preference and apply it across its network. (Source)
• Rust Glancer is a functional LSP server for Rust that reportedly uses two orders of magnitude less RAM. (Source)

One Line

We are a product company — that’s actually a key differentiator in this era.

— Martin Casado, on the MTS podcast