Mark Gurman Has Been Burying the Apple Vision Pro Since Before It Shipped. I’m Out of Patience.

Mark Gurman has personally written some variant of "the Apple Vision Pro is dying" roughly every three months for the past three years. MacRumors has syndicated each one. 9to5Mac has helped — including one delicious case I'll come back to in a minute. AppleInsider has occasionally played referee. The story has been wrong every single time. It is wrong this time too. And the cumulative damage of three years of inaccurate obituaries is being paid by the thousands of developers, studios, broadcast engineers, surgeons, educators, and small-business operators trying to build companies on this platform — me included.

Let me walk you through the timeline.

The Three-Year Funeral, Documented

That is the documentary. Three years. Roughly a dozen variants of the same obituary, from the same handful of writers, syndicated through the same handful of outlets. Wrong every time. No corrections, no retrospectives, no audit of the track record.

Of every funeral on that list, one deserves a second look.

The Forgotten Math

In August 2024, 9to5Mac published a piece on micro-OLED display economics that included this sentence, in their own voice, on the record:

"Some prior reports indicated Sony only has capacity to make about 1 million panels per year, thereby capping Vision Pro sales potential at around 500,000 sales per annum."

— 9to5Mac, August 2024

Capping. Vision Pro sales potential. At 500,000.

That is 9to5Mac telling readers in mid-2024 that 500,000 was the theoretical hardware ceiling. Not a sales target. The maximum number of devices that could physically be assembled.

Two months later, 9to5Mac followed with "Vision Pro reaches expected production target as Apple shifts supply chain focus," explaining that the ~400,000-unit number was Apple hitting its supply-constrained target. They called The Information's competing "production cut" coverage "hyperbolic."

Fast-forward fourteen months. IDC reports Apple shipped roughly 390,000 Vision Pros in 2024. 9to5Mac, MacRumors, and the rest of the aggregator economy run that exact number — the one their own reporting eighteen months earlier had identified as the supply ceiling — as proof of catastrophic flop. The Sony display cap vanishes from the coverage. The "this is the maximum" framing 9to5Mac themselves wrote is never linked, never cited, never acknowledged.

390,000 units against a ~450,000 hardware ceiling is 87% sell-through against the maximum number of devices that physically existed. In any other product category, "sold ~87% of what we could possibly manufacture in year one of a brand-new platform in a single country at a $3,499 price point" would be called running the inventory dry. In Vision Pro coverage it gets called a flop.

You cannot, in good faith, report in October that 400,000 is the supply-limited target Apple is hitting, and then a year later report 390,000 as a demand-side disaster. Those two stories cannot both be true. One of them is bullshit. I have my suspicion about which one.

Don't Take My Word — Take Gruber's

You don't have to take my word for any of this. Take John Gruber's, who I assume the Apple press corps still respects.

After the latest MacRumors obituary dropped, Gruber wrote that the report "comes as news to everyone at Apple working in the Vision Product Group." He had spoken to people inside. He laid out, with specifics, that the VPG was reorganized — hardware moved under John Ternus, software under Craig Federighi — in the same routine way every Apple platform gets absorbed once it stops being a secret project. He stated flatly: "I know for a fact that it is not true that the teams working on the Vision platform have 'been redistributed to other teams within Apple.'"

Gruber also pointed to the supply-cap context everyone else has memory-holed. He referenced the multiple pre-launch reports that "Sony could only manufacture a maximum of 900,000 displays per year, capping dual-display Vision Pro headsets at 450,000 per year" and noted Apple itself, per The Information, "expected to ship fewer than half a million headsets in the first year of its release."

And then Gruber delivered the line that should be tattooed on the inside of every Apple aggregator's newsroom door:

"When Apple threw in the towel on Project Titan (the car project) in February 2024, an all-hands was held to break the news, led by then-COO Jeff Williams and Titan project lead Kevin Lynch. The team didn't learn it from a fucking leak."

— John Gruber, Daring Fireball

Apple does not announce the death of major platforms via anonymous sourcing in MacRumors. That has never been how the company works. Anyone covering Apple for more than five minutes knows that. And yet the funeral keeps getting written.

What Was Actually Happening

Now let me tell you what was actually happening on the platform during those same three years of obituaries.

Apple is operating its own live linear sports broadcast. Six Lakers games this 2026 season in Apple Immersive. Apple's own broadcast truck. Apple's own producer, director, and announcers — Mark Rogondino on play-by-play, Danny Green on color. Seven camera angles. A 150 Mbps feed. Companies do not stand up dedicated linear broadcast operations for platforms they're winding down. They especially do not sign multi-year content deals to do so.

Blackmagic just shipped the URSA Cine Immersive 100G at $29,145, supporting live SMPTE-2110 output of Apple Immersive Video, after starting deliveries of the base model at $29,995 earlier this year. That is a custom $30,000 stereoscopic 8K cinema camera engineered for one customer's video format, with end-to-end DaVinci Resolve workflow integration. Hardware vendors do not bring those to market on speculation. They build them because the customer signaled the platform is real and a lot of capture infrastructure is going to be needed. The camera has already shot for the BBC at the Royal Albert Hall, NASA's Artemis II launch, MotoGP, and a Real Madrid documentary.

Surgeons have been performing cataract surgery wearing Vision Pro since October 2025. Pilots are training in it. Purdue stood up a "spatial computing hub built around Apple Vision Pro," cited by Apple's CFO Kevan Parekh on the Q4 2025 earnings call. X-Plane 12 — the world's most advanced flight simulator — is shipping to Vision Pro via NVIDIA CloudXR streaming this month.

John Ternus, the next CEO, sat down for a Tom's Guide interview with Greg Joswiak two weeks before the latest MacRumors funeral and described spatial computing in the "early innings" frame. Joswiak called Vision Pro "a product pulled into the present from the future." Tim Cook, not exactly a flowery man, told employees this is the most exciting time of his career to be building products at Apple.

The Vision Products Group is hiring senior engineers as I write this. AAPL closed yesterday at $276.83, sitting just under its all-time high after a record Q2 2026 of $111.2B in revenue at a 49.3% gross margin. This is not a company that needs to perform a "Vision Pro is dying" arc to manage analyst expectations. It is having one of the best financial years in the history of capitalism.

So which Apple is the real one? The Apple in the Bloomberg X posts? Or the Apple staffing up, signing broadcast deals, partnering with cinema hardware vendors, getting itself into operating rooms and flight simulators, and posting record numbers?

Why The Funeral Keeps Getting Written

Here's why this keeps happening.

"Apple has given up on Vision Pro" outperforms "Apple shipped a normal-cadence chip refresh while continuing a known multi-year platform investment" by an order of magnitude on engagement metrics. Every Apple blog runs on aggregation, and the aggregator's incentive is to repeat the loudest headline available with their own brand attached. Mark Gurman, an excellent reporter on iPhone supply chains, gets treated as a strategic oracle on a product line where his published track record is a coin flip. Inconvenient context — like a quietly-deleted prior piece from the same outlet, or a Sony display cap that defines what "selling well" even means — vanishes from the syndication chain. By the time the headline reaches a venture capitalist's Twitter feed, "according to one source familiar with the matter" has been laundered into "Apple killed it."

That is not journalism. That is a syndicated funeral procession sponsored by ad inventory. And the people paying the bill are the small businesses on the other end of the cap-table conversation.

The People Paying The Bill

Here's the part I really want the press corps to sit with.

I, and thousands of other people, are trying to build companies on this platform. We have employees, customers, partners, investors at the table. We are signing enterprise deals. We are producing immersive content for clients. We are integrating with hospitals, simulators, broadcast partners, and education systems. The work is real. The customers are real. The demand we're seeing on the ground is real.

And every three months, like clockwork, one of you publishes another anonymous-sourced piece declaring the platform dead, and our cap-table conversations restart from zero.

Last quarter I had a partner ask me, in good faith, "isn't Apple shutting Vision Pro down?" They had read the MacRumors headline. They had not read the walk-back. They had not read Gruber. They had certainly not read 9to5Mac's own forgotten August 2024 piece explaining what 500,000 units a year actually meant. They had read the obituary, formed an opinion, and brought it into a meeting that affects whether I get to keep building.

That meeting is happening right now, this week, all over the world, to thousands of people building on this platform. The cumulative cost of three years of inaccurate funeral coverage is tens of millions of dollars in pulled term sheets, slowed enterprise deals, and stalled partnerships. Most of it the press will never see, because we don't write press releases when a deal dies on the vine.

To Mark Gurman, MacRumors.com, 9to5Mac, AppleInsider, and the rest of the aggregator economy: I'm not asking for cheerleading. Skepticism is fine. Reporting on weak sales is fine. Quoting analysts who think the form factor is wrong is fine.

What's not fine is publishing "Apple Has Given Up" headlines based on anonymous sourcing that the dean of Apple commentary can refute with a single phone call to the team. What's not fine is running the same death notice every three months and never auditing your own track record. What's not fine is treating Gurman's strategic-direction takes — by Bloomberg's own standards a hedged opinion column — as supply-chain-grade fact, then stripping the hedges in syndication. And what is not fine is letting your own previous reporting on supply caps, production targets, and platform context vanish from the record the moment it becomes inconvenient to the new headline.

Apple has explicitly framed Vision Pro as a multi-year platform play. We are just starting year three of ten. Phase one is laying down infrastructure: the camera ecosystem, the broadcast partnerships, the developer tooling, the enterprise beachhead. Phase two is the cheaper hardware that opens the platform to a mass market. Apple has telegraphed all of this publicly, on the record, on stage, repeatedly.

If you'd like to write that story, my inbox is open.

If you'd like to write the thirteenth iteration of the same anonymous-sourced funeral, please at least put a footnote linking to your previous twelve.

Stop trying to kill an incredible platform for your own selfish clicks.