The Vision Pro: Not quite dead yet

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.

The latest is a story in MacRumors from Juli Clover, which makes the straightforward claim that “Apple Has Given Up on the Vision Pro After M5 Refresh Flop“:

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 2027. 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. ↩

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