It’s time to say goodbye. But before we go, we read some final letters, Steven hides in Sports Corner, and Jason answers a bit of podcast lore. Thank you all for listening to Downstream.
Now… hang on a second. Are we supposed to believe that the smart people at Apple speed-bumped the Vision Pro and then, when it didn’t sell like hotcakes you put on your face, they decided to give up on it? Because that sounds not right in several ways.
Say what you want about the Vision Pro—like it’s overpriced, too heavy, too niche a product, it doesn’t have enough experiences, those eyes are weird, it’s socially unacceptable to wear a big honkin’ thing on your fa—hey, hey, hey, alright already, we get it! I was being rhetorical when I said “say what you want”.…
Once again, I have ventured out of my home country and winged my way overseas.
This isn’t the first time I’ve written about my travel experiences. I detailed some wins and losses from my last international trip in 2024 and even wrote a post way back in 2015, in which I was considering not traveling with my Apple Watch out of fears it would get lost or stolen. Oh, how times have changed.
That said, we were attempting to travel light this time: just two carry on bags and two backpacks for two adults and one small child. And part of that was minimizing the number of devices that we needed to carry and all their attendant cables.
Overall, I think we did pretty well.
Power to the people
One of the things that I get most annoyed about when traveling is charging. I have a couple of super basic plug adapters for Europe and the UK that are fine, if bulky. But I’d been on the lookout for a nice universal power adapter—preferably one that would fit nicely in my go-bag of chargers and cables.
This time around, I found it in the form of the Anker Nano Travel Adapter (affiliate link). What I like about the Nano is first, that it’s not a giant box: it’s only about an inch thick, two inches wide, and a little over three inches long. In that, it’s not too far off from my Anker MagSafe power battery, which means it fits perfectly into the aforementioned bag.
While it doesn’t have every single power port known to humanity, it does at least cover some of the most common: Type A (US / Canada / Japan / China), Type C (Europe), Type G (UK / Singapore) and Type I (Australia). It also packs two USB-C ports and two USB-A ports, so you can charge your USB devices directly, as well offering a plug passthrough if you need to use a Type A or Type C plug.
The Anker Nano is compact and well-designed, with a bunch of USB ports.
It’s not the beefiest of charges: just 20W max, or 15W for the USB ports when sharing them, but it was plenty to charge a phone and Apple Watch overnight. (I did run into one or two instances where it seems like something didn’t charge correctly, though I wasn’t able to figure out exactly why).
I still ended up needing those extra power adapters for some additional electronics we brought for my kid, like his white noise machine and a baby monitor for our Airbnb. (We also lucked out, with the apartment we stayed at in Paris having a power strip that could accept US plugs.)
One thing I ended up surprisingly not needing on this trip very much: backup batteries. I brought three: the Anker MagSafe model, an older Jackery one with Lightning and micro-USB connectors, and the beefy one included in my Away luggage. Of those, I think the MagSafe model got used once or twice, but only by my wife. The iPhone 17 Pro’s battery held out just fine for all-day usage, including plenty of wayfinding and picture taking.
Make sure you’re connected
As I mentioned in my 2024 piece, eSIMs have made it super easy to stay connected while you’re traveling internationally. Apple’s continued to try and smooth the experience: when I activated my Airalo-provided EU & UK eSIM—unlimited data for a week for about $20—after arriving in France, I was prompted to use it as a Travel SIM, which would allow me to still get FaceTime and iMessages via my U.S. phone number.
That largely worked this time, though I did still run into a couple of weird glitches. For one thing, some contacts weren’t showing up in various places in iOS (Messages, Find My) with their names, but just their phone numbers. I eventually concluded it was because their U.S. phone numbers were not formatted correctly in Contacts for some reason.1
And despite having my AT&T data roaming off, I did notice that my phone would download a kilobyte of data every once in a while—maybe 4KB total over my entire trip. This kind of “data leakage” is not unheard of, but I haven’t yet been able to find out whether the carrier is going to try to charge me their international rate—I suppose I’ll see when I get my next bill.
But between my eSIM and plentiful Wi-Fi, I never lacked for connectivity. And, thanks to my Tailscale network, I was even able to access the U.S. version of streaming services so that I could download videos for my trip home.
Tripping the light fantastic
I remarked on it during my last overseas trip in 2024, but Apple Pay has truly changed the experience of going to other countries. Before I left this time around, I popped a few leftover UK pounds and some Euros into my wallet, just in case.
I ended up never using them.
In fact, I think I only took my credit card out once, when I thought Apple Pay had failed, though in retrospect, I think it was just because the terminal wasn’t ready yet. Otherwise, I used my phone and watch to pay for everything on the entire trip, from cafés to transit. The experience was just completely seamless—a far cry from days of yore where I used to worry about exchange rates or how to get cash in country.
Tap-and-go transit remains the best experience; I was a little disappointed with Paris’s system, which still requires you buy tickets on its transit card, rather than just using a contactless payment. It meant I had to make sure to buy a ticket every time I was about to use the Metro—not especially onerous, as the Transit Card is supported by the Wallet app and you can buy tickets right from there with Apple Pay, but another point of friction. Especially compared to my trips on the London transit system, where I never had to do anything but tap my phone or watch on a gate or while boarding a bus and go.
(My thanks, by the way, to my pal Jeremy Burge, whose excellent compendium, Express Transit, prepared me for what I would experience in both Paris and London.)
And while we didn’t get to take total advantage of Wallet’s latest boarding pass features, I had an easy enough time on both our flights and our one long train journey storing all of our boarding passes digitally. Honestly, the only real challenge was physically juggling my phone and passport—hopefully some day those Digital IDs will be acceptable for international travel.
Left to my devices
I of course brought my iPhone 17 Pro and AirPods Pro 2—I rarely leave home without the two of those. I also packed my Apple Watch Series 7—no worries about it getting lost or stolen, 2015-era me—and the Apple Watch Series 10 I use for sleep tracking.2
I also packed my M1 iPad Pro because an iPad is a great device for watching video on the plane. And I was very glad that my kid had his own iPad (an old 10.5-inch iPad Pro that will, at least, run iOS 17 and, therefore, many—but not all—of the modern streaming apps and games).3
But beyond pulling out my iPad for the plane and train trips, I didn’t end up using it at all. I got far more mileage from my Kobo Libra 2 and even from—gasp—paper books. Though the iPad itself is not particularly heavy or bulky, I did find myself wondering what if I didn’t have to bring it. I mostly got by just fine with my phone—all I would miss is having a larger screen for watching videos.
You probably see where I’m going with this. What if I could just unfold my iPhone into a larger screen for those few occasions, but the rest of the time just have a phone? Hmm. It’s a compelling idea. I especially like the idea of reducing the number of devices I carry that require charging. Maybe one day I can truly get away with one device to rule them all.
The only real downside to that old iPad? A Lightning port! Which meant I needed to bring a Lightning charging cable. I’ve almost managed to banish them from our house, but not quite. ↩
[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors, as well as an author, podcaster, and two-time Jeopardy! champion. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His next novel, the sci-fi adventure Eternity's Tomb, will be released in November 2026.]
Every year we ask the Apple IT/Mac admin community for their opinions about how Apple fared in past 12 months. You can read our 2026 Enterprise Report Card for the average scores and some juicy quotes. But if you want to read all the comments from the panelists who were willing to share in public—all 32,000 words of it—who are we to stand in your way? They wrote it, you read it. That’s how this works.
(The text below has been lightly edited for grammar and clarity.)
In 2021, device-management startup Kandji (now Iru) approached Six Colors to commission a new entry in our Report Card series focusing on how Apple’s doing in large organizations, including businesses, education, and government. We formulated a set of survey questions that would address the big-picture issues regarding Apple in the enterprise. Then we approached people we knew in the community of Apple device administrators and asked them to participate in the survey. We are especially grateful to the members of the Mac Admins Slack for their participation.
This is our sixth year doing the survey. Over the last few weeks, we took the temperature of about a hundred admins, half of whom report that they manage more than a thousand devices. They rated Apple’s performance in the context of enterprise IT on a scale from 1 to 5 in nine broad areas.
Below, you’ll see the survey results, plus choice comments from survey participants. Not all participants are represented; we gave everyone the option to remain anonymous and not be quoted. Though Iru commissioned this survey—and we thank everyone there for doing so again—it had no control over the survey results or the contents of this story.
My thanks to Monologue for sponsoring Six Colors this week.
Monologue is for people who think faster than they type. Which is most of us.
For everyday writing, Monologue is a smart dictation app that works where you already write, across Apple’s platforms. Speak naturally, and Monologue turns your voice into polished text for messages, emails, documents, notes, code, and more. It cleans up all the pauses, filler words, and chaos that human beings inevitably put into our speech, and makes it into clean, understandable writing.
For longer recordings, Monologue Notes captures the thinking that happens away from the keyboard: meetings, calls, walks, errands, and voice memos that usually disappear as soon as they are over. Start a note on your Apple Watch before a walk, keep recording from your iPhone during a call, review the transcript on your iPad, and pull it up on your Mac when it is time to do something with it. (And, yes, Monologue Notes can connect to agents and tools through API, CLI, and MCP support, if you want to use another tool to do even more.)
You can start free with 1,000 dictation words and 10 notes, or upgrade to Monologue Pro for unlimited dictation and unlimited notes. Six Colors readers can use code SIXCOLORS to get 20% off their first year of Monologue Pro. Try Monologue today.
Pretty soon, we aren’t going to have Tim Cook to kick around anymore. Or at least, when we kick him around, it’ll be a sort of executive chair kind of kicking. (Wait, I was told there would be no more kicking!)
The charts have all been generated, and Tim Cook hasn’t yet regenerated into John Ternus, so here’s a quick set of additional observations about what’s going on in the business of Apple.
A new definition of boring
Apple’s business has been very, very seasonal for a long time—certainly back to the introduction of the iPod, if not before. Apple sells a lot of stuff in the last three months of the year, not only because it’s the holiday season, but these days because it’s also new iPhone season.
Those holiday quarters are huge. They stand out on any chart you make. The other quarters, well, they’re the sag in the saddle. They’re important because you need 12 months to make a calendar, but they’ve never had the sizzle of the holiday quarter.
Which is why it’s so impressive that, for two successive “boring” quarters, Apple has generated more than $100 billion in revenue. In 2020, Apple’s “boring” quarters averaged $60.9 billion in revenue. That a company this large can still grow this much in five years is astounding. When I describe Apple as the world’s foremost machine that generates cash, I am not kidding.
Speaking of cash, back in 2018, Apple declared that its policy was to become “cash neutral over time,” because its cash flow had gotten so ridiculous that it was sitting on $163 billion in net cash. In practice, Apple attempted to spend its extra money largely through stock buybacks and shareholder dividends.
Eight years later and more than a trillion dollars of cash return later, things are changing, at least a little. “As we move ahead, we are no longer providing net cash neutral as a formal target, and we will independently evaluate cash and debt,” Apple CFO Kevan Parekh said on Thursday’s call.
Now, I’m sure there are a lot of complex financial reasons Apple has decided to back away from net cash neutral, and Parekh was quick to point out that Apple’s board had authorized $100 billion to be used in future stock buybacks. The company, he said, is still “very committed to returning excess cash to shareholders.”
The key concept here seems to be flexibility. It sure sounds to me like Apple wants the ability to, for example, stash a little extra cash away so that it’s capable of making big moves if it needs to. Maybe that’s capital expenditures involving AI stuff. Maybe it’s keeping enough cash ready to spring if there’s a company it feels like it can acquire, in whole or in part. (Apple’s cash flow is an enormous advantage should it come across a relevant company that’s in fiscal distress.)
I also have to wonder if the company might be considering larger investments to normalize its component supplies. Right now, RAM is at a premium, and Apple’s using every chip TSMC can manufacture for it. Maybe Apple wants the leeway to give billions of dollars to a partner to build a factory and pre-buy all the output of that factory for a certain number of years. Not cheap, but if you’ve got the cash, maybe a good longer-term investment.
We’ll see what happens. I just think it’s interesting that Apple went to the trouble of formally disengaging from its old monetary policy so it can get a little more room to maneuver. Usually, if you’re looking for that, it means you are thinking of maneuvering, right?
Memory costs are starting to affect Apple
Apple’s careful planning meant it could combat the rising cost of memory for a little while, but that time seems to be coming to an end. Here’s what Cook said Thursday:
In the December quarter, we really had a minimal impact due to memory, and you can kind of see that in the gross margin results. We said it would be a bit more in the March quarter, and we did see higher memory costs in the March quarter, and they were partially offset by benefits from carry-in inventory that we had. For the June quarter and what’s embedded in the guidance that Kevan went through earlier, we expect significantly higher memory costs. They are also partly offset by the benefit of carry-in inventory. And then, where we don’t give color beyond June, I can tell you that beyond the June quarter, we believe memory costs will drive an increasing impact on our business. And we’ll continue to evaluate this, and as we’ve said before, we’ll look at a range of options.
What are those options? Cook said he didn’t really want to go into it, but we can all probably guess: Lowering margins and/or raising prices. Apple tends to go about this in very careful ways—base prices may stay the same, with the cost of higher-end configurations seeing price increases. Its huge product margins give it room to maneuver, but Apple’s not ever going to want to give away margin. That’s not how it’s wired. Bottom line: Some Apple products are going to become more expensive in the near future, but it may be more complicated (and less obvious) than you expect.
Can’t sell ’em if you can’t make ’em
While having more demand for your products than you can fulfill is a good problem to have, it’s still a problem. Ideally, every person who wants to buy an Apple product would have their credit cards immediately charged and their product shipped. Unfortunately, we live in a world that suddenly has some dramatic tech supply constraints, and it bit Apple in the second quarter.
Oh, it’s the memory thing again, you might be thinking. But no! Apple’s current supply constraints are actually at Taiwan Semiconductor (TSMC), which can’t make Apple’s key SoCs (Systems on Chips) fast enough to fulfill Apple’s demand. Apple uses TSMC’s most advanced nodes, and according to Cook, “we’re not at the point where we’re saying this is going to end anytime soon.” There’s no button to push to make the conveyor belt at TSMC run faster.
Who does Cook blame? Himself, more or less. “We just under-called the demand,” he said. This constraint is hitting the iPhone as well as the Mac, and especially the Mac mini and Mac Studio, due to increased demands due to Apple silicon being a pretty great platform for agentic AI applications.
The MacBook Neo was also constrained, which is interesting, since I’m not sure that’s a TSMC supply problem. But Apple rolled it into its description of all the other issues it’s having. “We were very bullish on the product before announcing it, but we undercalled the level of enthusiasm that would be with it,” Cook said.
Memory is going to hit Apple, yes. And this quarter was already a record. And yet… if Apple had correctly forecast demand and made sure TSMC was able to supply that demand, it would’ve sold more iPhones and Macs in the last quarter. As I said, as bad stories go, it’s got good roots—but it’s still not ideal.
Tariff Talk with Tim
During a complicated question from J.P. Morgan analyst Samik Chatterjee about product margins, Parekh unusually half-answered the question and then stopped and “turned it over to Tim” so that Cook could read an obviously prepared statement about tariffs, which included this bit:
In terms of applying for a refund of tariffs paid, we’re following the established processes, and we plan to reinvest any amount we receive back into U.S. innovation and advanced manufacturing. These would be new investments and would be in addition to our prior commitments in the U.S.
This is the sort of politics Cook will continue to be plying from the boardroom. Sure, Apple’s going to try to get its tariff money back. But it’s going to do so using the perfectly normal and established process, and if it does get billions back from the U.S. government, it double-promises to reinvest that money in the United States, above and beyond its already stated commitments. Trump Administration, take note.
Remember this moment with Bullish Tim
I’m going to miss Cook on these quarterly calls. He pointed out that Thursday’s call was his 89th, which, yes, predates his era as CEO. (Steve Jobs only attended the calls occasionally, leaving Cook to preside over them even as Chief Operating Officer.)
Anyway, one of Cook’s signature earnings call moves is being bullish on emerging markets. So a tip o’ the cap to Wells Fargo analyst Aaron Rakers, who used his allotted two questions to ask Cook to play the hits—namely, to ask how he felt about Apple’s business in China and India.
After a few years in the doldrums, Apple’s last two quarters in China have been solid. Cook was quick to point out that the iPhone was the top-selling phone in urban China, the Mac mini was the top desktop in China, and the MacBook Air was the top laptop.
In terms of India, Cook got to point out (as he loves to do) that even with all of Apple’s growth there, it’s still got enormous growth potential:
It’s the second-largest smartphone market in the world and the third-largest PC market, and despite doing extremely well there for quite some time, we still have a modest share. And so I think that really speaks to the opportunity that we have…. Net-net, I’m over the moon excited about India.
I’m going to miss hearing from Tim Cook, the man who can generate the requisite enthusiasm about international business to use a phrase like “net-net over the moon.”
Some advice for John Ternus
During Cook’s introductory remarks on the earnings call, he allowed future CEO John Ternus to drop in and read a 250-word prepared statement. It was a necessary mutual-admiration society where Cook praised Ternus (“a brilliant engineer, a deep thinker, a person of remarkable character, and a born leader”), followed by Ternus immediately praising Cook (“one of the greatest business leaders of all time”). The whole point of this is to send the message to Wall Street that Apple’s got this and nobody needs to be worried.
What wasn’t quite as necessary was the door opened by Evercore analyst Amit Daryanani, who asked Cook if he could share any advice he had for John Ternus, given that Steve Jobs famously told Cook not to ask what he would do, but focus on doing what was right.
Here was Cook’s response:
I think Steve’s advice to me lifted a huge burden, and so that advice did well for me over the 15 years. For John… what I’ve told him is that one of the most important decisions he’ll make is where to spend his time. And I would spend it where the greatest benefit to the company and the users are, and never forget the north star for the company. We’re about making the best products in the world that really enrich other people’s lives, and if you keep focusing on that and make your decisions around that, it will produce a great business, and we’ll be able to build more products and do it all over again.
Now don’t get all misty on us, Tim. There’s still your 90th analyst call to come, sometime in late July. I hope someone remembers to bake a cake for that one.
Every quarter after releasing financial results, Apple CEO Tim Cook and CFO Kevan Parekh hop on a conference call with analysts to detail the quarter gone by, give a peek at what’s to come, and maybe brag a little about setting an all-time record or two. And oh, who’s this?! It’s future CEO John Ternus joining as well!
This is Six Colors’s transcript of the call for April 30, 2026.
On Thursday, Apple announced record second-quarter earnings, with $111.2 billion in revenue, up 17 percent year-over year. The company said it grew double digits across every geographic segment.
That’s the prevailing attitude around Apple Park in the wake of last week’s blockbuster announcement that Apple CEO Tim Cook would be stepping down after fifteen years. His replacement is John Ternus, senior vice president of hardware engineering and voted Most Likely to Create Some Rocking Computers by his high school yearbook.
Ternus has already won plaudits from those who have worked closely with him, and by and large Apple employees are excited to see what he does when he takes the top spot this fall.
One thing is clear, though: this won’t be Tim Cook’s Apple. Ternus brings a very different style to the company from a predecessor who seemed at times alternately buttoned-up and buttoned-down. Around the Cupertino campus, the former hardware chief is widely considered buttonless—outgoing and friendly to all his colleagues, greeting them warmly.
“The thing about John is he’s a hugger,” said one person who asked not be named because he doesn’t want the hugs to stop.…
At round four of the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship on May 3rd at Laguna Seca, the Porsche works team will show a historic Apple Computer-inspired livery. The special wrap is based on the Porsche 935 K3, which competed in major events in the 1980 season including the 24 hours of Le Mans. The one-time design of the two Porsche 963 celebrates two milestones happening in 2026: the 75th anniversary of Porsche Motorsport and 50 years since the founding of Apple.
From the rainbow Apple logo to the Motter Tektura wordmark, this is glorious.
Modern User Interface modifies the appearance of some control bars and dialogs to be more consistent with other Creative Cloud applications through adoption of Spectrum, Adobe’s multi-platform design system. We plan to modernize the entire user interface over future updates.
Wichary’s reaction to this was very much the same as mine:
On the surface, it feels like a lateral move. I do not personally find the new design language (Spectrum) attractive, or even particularly “modern.” The gestalt remains off and things are still generally misaligned – they’re just misaligned in net new ways.
Like Wichary, Cabel Sasser, and many other people, I have been using Photoshop since John Sculley was the CEO of Apple. Longtime users can be brutally resistant to change, but I would like to think that I remain open-minded. One can’t have used Photoshop for more than three decades without having adapted to change and found utility in the new features Adobe has added over the years. I’ve used generative fill. I’ve used AI-enhanced edge detection. I’m hip and with it.
But, as Wichary detected, what Adobe is doing with the Modern User Interface is not to make a new, improved, modern interface. Adobe’s own description gives it away: It’s a hammering of all of Adobe’s user interfaces so they look alike, across Creative Cloud. It’s a “multi-platform design system,” which means in addition to Adobe being committed to “modernizing” Photoshop by making it look like Premiere, it’s also going to make it look the same on the Mac as Windows.
Already, Photoshop desperately wants to run in single-window mode, with multiple documents opening in a single uberwindow—in other words, the stink of Windows. Fortunately, you can turn that feature off, and I have. I also recognize that plenty of creative apps that I have not been using for three decades—Affinity Designer comes to mind—prefer to stick all their toolbars and floating palettes in a single-window workspace, and load documents inside it. I don’t like it, but I can put up with it there. But it’s just not how I use Photoshop.
What frustrates me the most about moves like this Spectrum business, is that companies like to imply that changes of this sort are of benefit to their customers. But they aren’t. They are for the benefit of Adobe, which can standardize its interface across platforms and its own apps. I’m a Mac user who uses Photoshop. Forgive me if I do not care, not one bit, about how Photoshop looks on Windows or how Premiere looks anywhere.
That all said, of course, this decision could benefit Photoshop users, because Adobe could put in the work to make the app better while also fulfilling its own corporate goals of homogeneity.
Ha ha ha. Sorry. I tried to write that with a straight face.
The screenshots in this article—and all the images and videos in Wichary’s blog post—are horrific. The new Canvas Size dialog box doesn’t use Mac-standard type; it’s misaligned1, so the result is woefully ugly and feels wrong in a Mac context.
But as Wichary points out, the true crime is that the “modern” Canvas Size box is also incompetently implemented. Real Photoshop heads know you can enter a new canvas size simply by opening the dialog and typing the width number in pixels, pressing Tab, typing the height number in pixels, and pressing Return. The new dialog has no focus, so you have to click. Tab moves you to the measurement unit (Pixels, generally), not the next pixel count. Clicking in the dialog doesn’t select the pixel count, so you have to backspace or select all to delete it. And if you delete the entire number so that there’s nothing in the box, Photoshop displays a modal error message you have to click through, and then sets the number to 1.
Look, I am a reasonable person who is never going to advocate for nameless, faceless employees at some corporation to be fired for incompetence. But what I will say is that this sort of stuff should never have been exposed to anyone outside of Adobe, and that the people who think shipping this sort of thing is fine deserve a very stern talking-to. That is, if there’s anyone left at Adobe who cares about anything.
The Current Size pixel counts are hilariously aligned to the left edge of the text-entry box below them, rather than perfectly aligned to the actual text, as in the classic version. ↩
Last week it was a new CEO. This week for Apple, it’s probably going to be the usual quarterly report of record revenues and profits.
On Thursday afternoon, Apple will announce the results of its second fiscal quarter for 2026. Last quarter was an all-time record, but that was the holiday quarter, which is usually Apple’s biggest. This quarter will be smaller, but Apple projected that revenue would grow by 13% to 16%. That means Apple expected this quarter’s revenue to be between $108B and $111B. This would mark only the second time—after last year’s fiscal fourth quarter—that the company surpassed $100B in revenue in a non-holiday quarter. It’s a sign that maybe $100B quarters are… just routine for Apple now? Astounding.
As usual, Six Colors will be here to report on the whole thing. Around 1:30 pm PDT, the company will release its financial reports and we’ll be on the scene with a load of charts and some analysis. At 2pm PDT, there will be an hour-long phone call with analysts that we’ll also transcribe. At 4pm PDT, Dan and I will stream live on YouTube with analysis, including discussion of all of those charts!
This should be an interesting one, in terms of how Apple characterizes the CEO transition, what it might say about early sales of the MacBook Neo, and the lingering concern that RAM shortages are going to impact Apple’s sales and bottom line. And of course, Wall Street will be closely awaiting Apple’s projections for how Q3 will go.
The Vision Pro may very well be the Rasputin of Apple products. Ever since its release, it’s been plagued with reports of being a flop, doomed, dead on arrival. But as the dust clears, many of those reports have proved to be, in that time-honored expression, greatly exaggerated. The Vision Pro soldiers onward.
Apple has all but given up on the Vision Pro after the M5 model failed to revitalize interest in the device, MacRumors has learned. Apple updated the Vision Pro with a faster M5 chip and a more comfortable band in October 2025, but there were no other hardware changes, and consumers still weren’t interested.
Now, I’m not privy to MacRumors’s sources but I’m going to say that I’m skeptical of this pronouncement. And I’m not the only one: Jonathan Wight, who worked in Apple’s AR/VR group until 2022, disputed the report on Mastodon, and that jibes with what I’ve heard privately.
But I’m not surprised. The Vision Pro has always been ripe for this kind of commentary because Apple has taken a distinctly un-Apple approach with it, selling an extraodinarily high-priced device in limited volumes. That’s a contrast to most of its products, which operate in very high quantities. And given that one of Apple’s other high-price/low-volume products was recently 86ed, I can see the temptation to think that the company is taking care of all family business.
But intentions matter. From everything we’ve heard, the Vision Pro was never anticipated to sell in high volumes. Likewise, this report declares the M5 revamp of the Vision Pro a “flop” but from a macro perspective, replacing the M5 processor in the Vision Pro was less about making it more attractive to consumers than it was about the fact that it was ramping down production of the M2 chips in the existing model.1 Heck, if Apple really was killing the Vision Pro, why would it update it in the first place?
Clover’s story goes on to say:
Apple has apparently stopped work on the Vision Pro and the Vision Pro team has been redistributed to other teams within Apple. Some former Vision Pro team members are working on Siri, which is not a surprise as Vision Pro chief Mike Rockwell has been leading the Siri team since March 2025.
These personnel moves feel like the germ of this story, and given that, I can certainly see why the natural conclusion would be to point to the Vision Pro’s demise. Especially when combined with recent stories reporting that incoming CEO John Ternus was “wary of the mixed-reality headset that became the Vision Pro”.2 Surely he’s exercising his newfound power to kill this hated product dead!3
But that conclusion is hardly foregone. Look, it’s pretty clear that there are lots of other projects at Apple that are higher priority than the Vision Pro right now. That work on Siri is clearly incredibly significant, especially in light of promises that are now two years old and still haven’t shipped. Rockwell was essentially parachuted into the Siri role as a fixer: it’s no surprise that he would draw from a trusted pool of his reports to get the job done.
Likewise, Apple has reportedly accelerated work on its smart glasses product, mounting a somewhat late challenge to products from Meta and, soon, Samsung. Again, if Apple is prioritizing getting that product out the door, it’s not hard to imagine that the company might shift personnel to work on it—especially if we’re talking personnel who have experience with augmented reality.
I have no trouble believing that Vision Pro development is on the back burner. By all accounts the technology to get to the device that Apple really wants to make just isn’t here yet, and isn’t expected to be anytime soon. Could that mean the Vision Pro will eventually be killed? Absolutely. But not only is the Vision Pro still a genuinely technologically impressive device, but everything Apple developed for it will almost certainly inform future products—especially if the company is still trying to ultimately make a lighter pair of augmented reality glasses. The Vision Pro is fine where it is: even the original M2 model is still an incredibly capable device. Apple can continue as it’s doing now: building up a library of content for the device and working on pushing the envelope of its software capabilities.
Which leads me to my final point: if you want to know if the Vision Pro really is in trouble, then the clearest indication will come just over a month from now, at WWDC 2026. Apple will, presumably, take the wraps off visionOS 27 alongside the rest of its platform updates; look to see not only how much time it gets during the keynote, but, more importantly, the magnitude of updates (or lack thereof). Because the Vision Pro is a story about a platform, and just as macOS was not dictated by the success or failure of a single Mac model, the Vision platform is not merely tied to the Vision Pro as its exists today.
The benefits of the M5 Vision Pro were functionally “things the M5 processor can do”. The definition of low-hanging fruit. ↩
To get a little inside baseball: that phrasing feels very careful to me in terms of tense, suggesting that the source in question knew how Ternus felt about the project during its development, but not about the actual shipping product. ↩
[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors, as well as an author, podcaster, and two-time Jeopardy! champion. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His next novel, the sci-fi adventure Eternity's Tomb, will be released in November 2026.]
The techie tasks we refuse to do anywhere but our computers, whether we want our chatbots to be warm and friendly, the best tech we’ve used traveling internationally, and the technology we love that has nothing to do with our public work.
There was big news from Apple’s boardroom last week. As you know, Tim Cook’s getting kicked upstairs and John Ternus is going to assume the mantle of Apple CEO. But that’s not the news I’m talking about. The other big news is that Johny Srouji is being named Chief Hardware Officer.
Nobody outside of those who follow Apple or the chip industry closely has ever heard of Srouji. (For that matter, they hadn’t heard of Ternus, either.) But this is not a minor executive promotion. The fact that Apple made the announcement simultaneously with Cook’s departure and Ternus’s elevation shows that. Srouji’s promotion—and more importantly, retention— is vitally important for Apple.
Given a week to process the news of Apple’s CEO transition, we ponder where Apple will go under John Ternus, the role of Johny Srouji, and why a book about Tim Cook would not be a cookbook.
