How the Vision Pro Rollout Inflamed Tensions at Apple

To roll out its new mixed-reality headset, the Vision Pro, Apple devised a plan almost as intricate as the device itself.

In January 2024, Apple summoned hundreds of retail employees to its campus in Cupertino to train them on the Vision Pro’s features. The company asked them to sign nondisclosure agreements swearing them to secrecy about the device, and even about where in Cupertino the training occurred. While on Apple’s campus, they were required to place their phones in GPS-blocking Faraday bags. Employees who had completed a day or two of the training were not allowed to describe the experience to other retail employees who were about to receive their first demo, so as not to step on the novelty.

It all heightened the romance when the workers finally tried out the headset. Corporate officials showed off the way the device could transport them to an assortment of landscapes, seascapes, and moonscapes, or re-create the sensation of watching movies on a big screen.

“Coming back from Cupertino, it was genuinely the coolest fucking thing I’ve ever seen,” said Megen Leigh, a longtime Apple employee in Columbus, Ohio, who flew to California for the training. “I cannot express enough how insanely brilliant this device is.”

It fell to trainers like Leigh to lead four-hour workshops for salespeople upon returning to their home stores. After that, the salespeople would get an hour of company time to rehearse the demo and to become fluent with the script, and two chances to practice on fellow employees.

On paper, the plan looked airtight. In practice, the Vision Pro rollout proved to be a fiasco in many stores.

The demos hinged on a number of details that employees often struggled to master. Before a customer could begin to use the device, employees would have to scan their face, pick from roughly 25 sizes of light seals, and affix them correctly so that unwanted light wouldn’t compromise the images. Users controlled the device with their eyes and fingers, using subtle movements that could be counterintuitive at first. The script that the company composed for the demos went on for more than a dozen screens.

Further complicating the rollout was the way Apple stores had altered their hiring and staffing over the years. Under Steve Jobs, Apple had prided itself on having well-staffed stores with highly trained employees. In the years since his death, however, Apple had staffed its stores more leanly and relied on a more transient workforce.

By the time of the Vision Pro launch in early 2024, many Apple salespeople had only recently become permanent employees after being brought on as temps in the fall. They had little experience with an Apple product launch. “It was the first time a lot of people had to learn a script,” said Kevin Gallagher, a longtime Apple Store employee from Towson, Maryland. “They didn’t have the capability of doing it.”

And with stores understaffed, many workers didn’t get the training and practice time that Apple corporate intended. “I got a 20-minute demo. I got maybe 30 minutes to review the script, did a demo on one person who had went to Cupertino, and was thrown from the nest,” said Sam Hernandez, a longtime salesperson at a flagship Apple Store in Chicago. (Apple declined to comment for this story.)

In the end, estimates indicated that Apple sold fewer than 500,000 Vision Pros in 2024 versus roughly 10 million Apple watches in their first year and the more than 200 million iPhones it sold annually.

The reasons for the disappointment went far beyond the fumbling at retail outlets. At about 1.5 pounds, the device was too heavy to wear for hours-long stretches, making it less than ideal as a work tool. It offered only a small number of apps compared with other Apple products and was lousy for video calls because it couldn’t stream the user’s face the way a phone camera could. Instead, it generated a zombielike “persona” that sometimes bore little resemblance to the user. And, of course, there was the exorbitant price: $3,500 for the baseline version and closer to $4,000 once you added in common accessories, like prescription eye inserts and a travel case.

But the role of the Apple Stores in the Vision Pro debacle revealed a deeper problem: It showed how far the stores, and the company itself, had traveled from Jobs’ original vision almost a quarter century earlier.

When Steve Jobs launched the Apple Store in 2001, the Apple cofounder breezily dismissed predictions that retail would be his undoing. The company’s former finance chief told Businessweek that “Apple’s problem is it still believes the way to grow is serving caviar in a world that seems pretty content with cheese and crackers.”

The observation was right on some level. Jobs insisted on pricey real estate in malls and city centers rather than the cheap, out-of-the-way spots where computer retailers tended to congregate. He spent lavishly on blond wood floors and stark white counters to cultivate a warm, futuristic aesthetic. His biographer Walter Isaacson notes that Apple took inspiration from the concierge desk at a Ritz-Carlton when developing the Genius Bar, the part of the store where technical experts fix devices.

But the preoccupation with the store’s extravagances missed a deeper point: Jobs saw the Apple Store not so much as a retail outlet but as a church for evangelizing to the unconverted. He wanted the world to know that Apple’s simple but powerful tools would give people access to whatever stirred their passions—photos, songs, movies—and help them create these things on their own.

In a video tour of the world’s first Apple Store, in Tysons Corner, Virginia, released six days before its grand opening, Jobs pointed out that “literally half of the store” was devoted not to hardware sales but to teaching people about the devices and their capabilities.

Employees were a particular obsession for Jobs and his head of retail, Ron Johnson. Jobs approved generous benefits like health insurance on the theory that any employee who felt second-class would likely make a customer feel second-class, too. Store leaders were supposed to interview every employee they hired and generally avoid temps. “Retailers for ages have depended upon what you call a flexible workforce,” said Denise Young, the longtime HR chief for Apple retail. “In the US, they would hire seasonal workers—people who come on board and made holiday money. And we knew that was just never going to work for us. We saw such a difference in caliber.”

The stores were an extension of Jobs’ view of the company writ large. He lived by the mantra “Don’t worry about price” and repeatedly urged his team “to focus on building … an ‘insanely great’ product,” as Isaacson noted. Upon returning to Apple as CEO in 1997, 12 years after he’d been purged by the board, Jobs structured the company so that few bean counters or bureaucrats would be in a position to resist him. He saw to it that his top designer, Jony Ive, reported to him directly and made every other function—engineering, operations, finance—subordinate.

When Tim Cook succeeded Jobs in 2011, six weeks before the Apple cofounder died of complications from cancer, he brought with him a somewhat less utopian mantra. Inventory, Cook liked to say, is “fundamentally evil.” Because companies have to pay to store excess products and supplies, and because the value of inventory decreases over time as it risks becoming damaged or obsolete, inventory is inherently costly.

An industrial engineer by training, Cook was relentlessly focused on shrinking such costs and on increasing profitability. Over his decade-plus tenure, he substantially increased the portion of revenue that came from services like Apple Music, iCloud storage, and the App Store, which brought in a steadier flow of cash through subscriptions or commissions and saddled the company with fewer expenses.

Such changes were a stunning financial success. But, over time, the relentless optimization too