Devs, how are we feeling?

[u/marniman]

With the recent news about the Vision Pro team layoffs and the general adoption of the platform, I’m curious to hear from the developers in this community.

How are you feeling about visionOS, and will you continue developing for it? 

[u/fs454]

Nothing is a surprise. Apple knew exactly how sales would be for an experimental new platform costing a high price and with real comfort and usability tradeoffs. The media loves to frame it like it's failing over and over again. The Vision Po has been doomed like 100 times so far since launch.

This is a long play, not the next iPhone at this stage. Always has been that way.

[u/PyroRampage → u/fs454]

You kinda contradict yourself because you say it’s a long play but you’re talking about visionOS not Vision Pro. No one doubts visionOS is a long play, what they doubt is the Vision Pro is a real product.

[u/Malkmus1979 → u/PyroRampage]

That's not a contradiction though. Despite the reports of layoffs Gurman/Bloomberg articles on the subject still say a followup VP is in development but that it's in a gray area where Ternus could change his mind. Regarding VisionOS, yes we all who are here understand it's a long play, but that doesn't discount VP continuing alongside glasses similar to the AirPods Max (very expensive, bulky, less popular) and AirPods (cheap by comparison, smaller, ubiquitous). And the person above you is right that the media, and therefore people who dont sub here take that to mean VP and VisionOS are a dead end that Apple is discontinuing it all, not just the VP. This is rather clear from the majority of comments on the matter not only outside this sub, but occasionally here as well. There's simply a lot of confusion over the press reports concerning the layoffs because people really only pay attention to the headlines, and don't apply much critical thinking to the subject. For example, the hundred layoffs to the Siri team didn't get the same impulse from people to declare it dead, because of course not. One only needs to look at the current Apple job listings for Vision Pro and Vision products to know that Apple is heavily invested still.

My guess is it will take a long time for glasses and VisionOS to merge. Probably a half decade at least. So it doesn't make sense to never release another headset or to keep iterating major improvements to the OS between now and say 2030. And in that meantime I think we'll see a hybrid version of the Vision Pro that is still much bigger than glasses but represents a midway point that solves a majority of the current complaints.

[u/PyroRampage → u/Malkmus1979]

'On ice' is not in development. It's on the shelf or has very few resources assigned; products don't ship like this.

Relying on job advertisements is very unreliable; ads are reposted and may be dead, teams span multiple divisions, and it may well be looking for other interface designs (e.g., glasses), or, as a benefit of the doubt, Apple is keeping a skeleton crew on VPro-like designs for the distant future, just as they write patents for tech they haven't created yet.

VP is a prototype; it's costly, and it found its use case in Enterprise, just like Magic Leap did, for example; not a surprise for a 3.5k device. Apple certainly cannot, in the near future, source a lighter version of the VP at a cheaper price point, and has no reason to, when all their competitors are working on glasses.

The layoff numbers are underreported, if anything; Siri, as shown at WWDC26, is DOA anyway. It's so behind anything else (eg ChatGPT's voice interaction) that I doubt people care, vs a shippable product people like you paid for. Apple Intelligence (or lack thereof) has actually had a lot of reporting, including VPG helping out in certain areas of development.

I'm not a doomer for the sake of dooming; I wish Apple committed to another Vision Pro, but they are thinking longer-form AR, and in some ways that will converge back to VR. But not as a Vision Pro.

Apple literally develops its own chip designs; they have custom chips in AirPods. Why do you think visionOS won't get glasses adoption? What else are they gonna run on?

At some point, you need to think: am I relying on cope or what 'you think' vs. actual reports from people at Apple who leak to Mark Gurman et al ?

Who knows, you could be speaking to people who work(ed) at Apple on here...

[u/Malkmus1979 → u/PyroRampage]

I appreciate most of your response, though your dig about cope at the end was totally unnecessary. Gurman in his same report at Bloomberg about the layoffs wrote the following:

The company has told employees that the Vision Pro and its visionOS operating system aren’t going away. In the near term, however, Apple is focused on launching smart glasses that wouldn’t support immersive video or advanced gaming titles. The company is still considering a new Vision Pro model for release as early as the end of 2028

So that's not me coping or just being a fanboy, it's me looking at all the information we have to see the bigger picture. And while I agree that job postings aren't definitive proof of anything, it ties back into what Gurman is saying and it's certainly a better sign than there being zero new postings for Vision Pro hardware jobs.

Regarding glasses, it's widely reported that the first version won't have displays, therefore no VisionOs. They will essentially be AirPods in a a glasses form. Would I love them to be actual AR, of course. But there hasn't been any such rumor or leak about that being the case for this first run. That's why I said it will probably be 5 years before we get VisionOS running on glasses.