Apple clears two bad bets off the books a week before Ternus takes over

Two hundred roles against the 166,000 full-time employees Apple last disclosed works out to about 0.12 percent of the company ^[2][8][12]. Nothing in that number moves an operating margin. What moves is which work continues: the team making games for Vision Pro is effectively shut and the group producing 3D video has been pared back, according to the Bloomberg report of the cuts ^[3].

Games and immersive video are the demo material for a headset. Withdrawing the first-party staff who make them, for a device Bloomberg describes as poorly selling ^[3], is a decision about how much content Apple is willing to fund itself, and it was taken before the incoming chief executive had to defend it.

The Siri half is the more structural one. A large share of the affected employees worked on Siri features ^[4], while Google has been engaged to help revamp the assistant ^[6], which has trailed the chatbots from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google itself ^[5]. Removing internal feature staff at the moment an outside partner takes on the rebuild converts a capability Apple owned into one Apple procures. Procured capability ships on a partner's calendar.

Apple's own framing is that it is realigning teams to "evolve" the business, that new roles will be created, and that a limited number of existing roles are affected ^[7]. The new-roles half is not checkable from outside until Apple next discloses headcount, which it last did in September 2025 ^[8].

Fortune reads the timing as getting unpleasant work out of the way so John Ternus arrives with clean hands, just over a week out from the handover ^[1]. Both consequences of that hold at once. He does not own the cut, and he no longer owns the option either: restarting a games team is a hiring cycle, not a budget line someone restores in a planning review.

The hardware backdrop does not argue for a second attempt. Amazon has raised prices across its own devices, taking the base Echo Dot from $49.99 to $79.99 and its 16GB Kindle from $109.99 to $149.99 ^[9], and says it did so after absorbing significant increases in memory and storage component costs for as long as it could ^[10]. Fortune places Amazon as the latest large technology firm passing memory shortages through to buyers ^[11]. A headset with weak sales is a harder internal case when the bill of materials is moving against it.

So the two products Apple has been questioned about most are the two it has just stopped staffing at full strength. Whatever Ternus says about either in his first months, the resourcing answer was written down before he had the job.