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 took a toll on workers. Under Cook, Apple staffed some of its customer-facing businesses more leanly and increased the portion of positions that relied on contractors, who did not enjoy the same pay and perks as direct employees. Contractors typically had to eat their lunch off the clock and were even forbidden from drinking beer at monthly “beer bashes.”

Cook naturally stressed efficiency at the Apple Store, too. Shortly after taking over as CEO, he hired a British electronics store executive named John Browett to run the company’s retail business and empowered him to trim fat, according to the book After Steve, by Tripp Mickle.

“Tim resonated with John because, as Tim was, John was very strong on operational efficiencies,” said Denise Young. “The ops people and finance people thought John was the answer.”

Browett soon proved too Cook-like even for Cook. Many store employees, managers, and executives chafed when he tried to slash hours and scale back staffing. “It was a little bit of organ rejection,” Young said. Apple called the staffing changes “a mistake,” and the new guy was out in less than a year. (Browett declined to comment but has spoken publicly about not being a good fit at Apple.)

The misstep appeared to buy the stores a reprieve, as Cook replaced Browett with Angela Ahrendts, the CEO of the luxury brand Burberry. With her fashion sensibility, Ahrendts was a hire more in the vein of Apple’s design chief, Jony Ive, than Tim Cook.

But in subtle ways, the stores’ operations continued to reflect Cook’s determination to squeeze more nickels out of them. For example, the company shifted its in-store training from a classroom format led by a human instructor to a largely self-guided format in which employees made their way through a succession of screens. “When I first started at Apple, I had a three-week class where there was a person who sat with me and the group of people who got hired the whole time,” said Kevin Gallagher. “Now it’s about a week of computer modules that you click through, then you’re cut free.”

When Ahrendts left the company in 2019 amid declining store traffic, Cook replaced her with Deirdre O’Brien, an MBA and longtime lieutenant who pushed the stores even closer to conventional retail. Under Ahrendts, salespeople had mostly been judged on their net promoter score—in effect, how favorably customers felt about the experience. After O’Brien took over, managers began pushing more specific metrics: How many new phones are you activating? How many accessories are you selling? And are you getting customers to sign up for AppleCare+, the company’s extended warranty and customer support program?

“We’ve become a place where you come in and someone asks you 57 times in a transaction, ‘Do you want AppleCare+?’” said a longtime Apple Store employee in the Kansas City area.

The size of the store staff dwindled under O’Brien, putting more strain on each employee, and the company would bring in a large contingent of temps during busy times like the holidays.

Perhaps no change better epitomized the shift at the Apple Store under Cook and O’Brien than a position called the “creative.” In its earliest incarnation under Jobs, the creative was a kind of personal coach. For $99 a year, a customer could essentially sign up for as many hour-long, “One to One” tutorials with a creative as they wanted.

“It was the best deal,” said Megen Leigh, the longtime employee in Columbus, who worked as a creative for several years. “What they were making off the program versus how much they were paying us didn’t add up. But it created a loyal customer base.”

Under Ahrendts, the company replaced the one-on-one tutorials with free group sessions called “Today at Apple” that were led by creatives and generally involved riffing on a set of company-provided bullet points. Then, in 2019, Apple added a more overt marketing element to the sessions, many of which dwelled on specific products. Leigh recalled a session about the new “magic keyboard,” a keyboard that could be connected to other devices. “It was half an hour of talking about the keyboard—how to use the track pad, the keyboard shortcuts,” Leigh said. “It was the dumbest session ever. That one was not even a veiled advertisement.”

The company suspended the in-person sessions during the pandemic and didn’t bring them back for two years. When it finally did, the exercise felt half-hearted to many creatives. At the Towson, Maryland, store, creatives who had once taught six or eight sessions a day when they were one-on-one affairs, and four a day when they became classes, found themselves doing only one or two. Increasingly, they were summoned to the sales floor instead.

The change demoralized creatives like Gallagher and his coworker Chaya Barrett. Barrett had worked at the store part-time while attending college at Towson University, then accepted a full-time creative position after graduating in 2018 and failing to find another job.

Initially, becoming a creative felt like a solid fallback. But Barrett was ascending to the job just as it was changing, and it began to feel like a bait and switch. “We got into the creative role so we didn’t have to sell,” she said. “The main reason Kevin and I as creatives were so frustrated is that we were being underutilized in our role and overutilized everywhere else.”

At Towson, the growing frustrations prompted employees like Gallagher and Barrett—often college-educated and overqualified for their positions—to try to organize a union. When their coworkers voted to back the move in June of 2022, Towson became the first union at any Apple location in the United States.

But by the time Apple launched the Vision Pro in early 2024, the two sides were stalemated over a labor contract, and the product rollout was heightening the tensions.

Apple once again suspended the classes taught by creatives like Barrett while they pitched in with Vision Pro demos, which initially attracted a crush of curious interlopers. “You have people walking by, looking over your shoulders as you’re trying to get the demo done,” she said. “Kids are crying, people are yelling, angry about whatever they’re angry about, stools are dropping, they sound like gunshots and everyone’s traumatized about that.”

The madhouse atmosphere quickly revealed the shortcomings in employees’ training on the device, with demos varying widely in quality as lines backed up. “Some people were good at it,” said Eric Brown, another Towson employee. “Some people were taking an hour.”

With stores staffed so leanly, it had been a stretch for many managers to pull employees off the floor for their mandated training and practice time. At Leigh’s store in Columbus, the training was sufficiently haphazard that the demos many workers got included a series of blurry videos and photos, thanks to small mistakes made in putting the device on their face. “I started going back through employees who had gotten shit demos,” she said. “All but one had a drastically better experience by having someone who knew how to properly fit the device.”

And because so few employees could afford the device even with their 25 percent employee discount, they had little opportunity to experiment with it on their own. “Most of us there have iPhones, a lot of us have iPads,” said Eric Brown. “If you own the product, you can speak to it, be enthusiastic about it.”

About a week after the Vision Pro launch, managers in many stores eased off on the idea that salespeople should deliver the script largely from memory and allowed them to read it from an iPad, which some did in a halting, robotic monotone. A few months later, many stores abandoned the script altogether.

By this point, customers were losing interest in trying out the device, much less purchasing it. Managers asked workers to circulate through the store to recruit customers for demos, and some unofficially relaxed the age limit, which had been 13.

“I had to do one of those demos for an 11-year-old whose face was too small,” said Gallagher. A manager had met the child’s family outside the store on a day off and encouraged them to come in. “They made an exception,” he said. “It was a very weird situation.”

Nothing seemed to work. Across several stores, salespeople reported doing dozens of demos without closing a single sale. “We sell maybe one a week,” Barrett said in late May, two weeks after the union had voted to authorize a strike in order to make a final push for a contract.

“Uh, none a week,” Billy Jarboe, a coworker, corrected her. “If we do a return, we’re negative.”

In the summer of 2024, the union and the company settled on a contract that offered pay increases of roughly 10 percent over three years for the typical employee, along with a compromise on a scheduling change that could have forced some part-timers to quit.

On their own, the financial gains were hardly eye-popping—Apple could always turn around and raise wages across all retail stores by a similar amount.

But the contract also capped the number of temps the company could hire at 25 percent of the store’s permanent employees and created a process for the union to litigate the case of anyone it believed had been unfairly fired or disciplined. Gallagher felt the new rules could begin to reverse more than a decade of rising stress and insecurity, and restore what workers loved about Apple to begin with.

For years, Apple’s heavy investment in stores had paid dividends not just for employees but for its own bottom line. As recently as 2015, store employees had helped save the company from the disappointing launch of the Apple Watch, whose first-year sales the company had forecast to be about 40 million before cutting its target by more than 70 percent, according to After Steve.

By the end of the next year, Apple had salvaged the watch by marketing it as a health and fitness device, a solution that partly came from executives who noticed an industry-wide rise in sales of wearable fitness products, but partly bubbled up from the stores as well. In their daily morning meetings about the watch, managers would ask: “What are you guys seeing? What are the best practices we can share?” recalled Lindsay King, another longtime Towson worker. Employees, who could buy a basic version of the watch for under $200 and experiment with it, would frequently emphasize the health and fitness applications.

But whereas Apple’s retail employees had once helped bail the company out of a disappointing product launch, this time they exacerbated it. The honchos in Cupertino had understood that selling the Vision Pro would require a deft human touch, hence the elaborate training plans. But they did not seem to appreciate how much stores would struggle to execute them—how much Apple had degraded its retail operation.

At the store level, managers seemed less convinced of the importance of salespeople than in the past, and perhaps more confident that the device would sell itself once customers sat for a demo. “We know that if we put the thing on someone’s face they’re going to have a good experience,” one manager told Leigh. “I was like, ‘We’re not going to agree on that. You’re entirely wrong.’”

Excerpted from Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class, by Noam Scheiber. Copyright 2026 by Noam Scheiber. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.