Apple has made its second round of job cuts in two months, and like the first it is small. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reported on Sunday that the company laid off "a handful" of employees on its Fitness+ subscription service last week. The people affected included staff working on Time to Walk and Time to Run, the audio sessions Apple Watch owners play through headphones instead of watching a trainer on screen.
A month earlier, on 21 August, Bloomberg reported that Apple was cutting more than 200 roles. About 100 were in the Vision Pro organisation, where a team making games for the headset was largely shut down and immersive video production was scaled back. The other 100 or so came from Siri and the Intelligent Systems Experience group, the software team behind some of the artificial-intelligence features on its devices.
Neither round moves the headcount. Apple last disclosed 166,000 full-time employees, in September 2025, as Fortune noted. A few hundred people is about a tenth of one percent of that. But the cuts are the first to fall under John Ternus, who succeeded Tim Cook as chief executive on 1 September. What they have in common says more than their size.
The common thread is content
Take the August cuts first. The Vision Pro reductions fell on games and immersive video, which are programming, not hardware. The Siri cuts were explained as a technical reorganisation. Apple told Bloomberg it would create new roles as part of the change and that it was "committed to supporting" the people affected, "including opportunities to apply for other roles at Apple."
The Fitness+ cuts fit the same pattern. Time to Walk launched in January 2021, a month after the service itself. Each episode puts a well-known guest on a walk, telling stories with music between them. Time to Run followed in January 2022, with trainers leading runs along routes in named cities. Neither is software. They are shows, produced week after week, and a subscriber who has heard the back catalogue has one reason fewer to keep paying.
That is the cost Gurman pointed to. According to 9to5Mac's account of his newsletter, the service faces "considerable costs, ever-present demand for new content and subscriber churn rates." He expects new releases to "drop in frequency" rather than stop, and does not believe the service is "on the chopping block." He also wrote that the cuts are "widely seen within the Fitness+ organization as the beginning of more drastic cost-cutting measures and other major changes to the service in the months and years ahead."
Why Fitness+ is exposed
Fitness+ costs $9.99 a month or $79.99 a year in the United States, and is included in the top tier of the Apple One bundle. Apple has never published a subscriber count. That silence matters, because inside a bundle a service's worth is hard to see from outside. It is judged by whether it keeps people in the bundle, not by what it charges on its own.
The service has been under review for almost a year. According to 9to5Mac, its future was put under review in November 2025 and oversight moved to Eddy Cue, who runs services, and Sumbul Desai, who leads health. Gurman now speculates that Fitness+ could be folded into a redesigned Health app. That would make sense if Apple values the workouts more as a feature of the Watch than as a product of their own.
None of this means Apple is short of money. In the quarter to 27 June it reported revenue of $109.4 billion, up 16 percent, and services revenue of $30.7 billion, up 12 percent, both records for a June quarter. Services are now Apple's second-largest business and its highest-margin one. The cuts are not about the total. They are about which services earn their place in it.
The Ternus question
Mr Ternus built his career in hardware engineering, which he ran before taking over, and it is tempting to read these cuts as a hardware executive's verdict on content. The evidence does not yet support that.
The August cuts were announced before he took over. Fortune read them as a way to get "some unpleasant work out of the way" before the handover. The Mac Observer noted that the Fitness+ decision may well have been reviewed before he started. Mr Cook remains executive chairman. Apple has not announced a wider layoff programme and, as far as has been reported, has said nothing publicly about the Fitness+ reductions. The number of people affected has not been disclosed.
What can be said is narrower. In two rounds a month apart, Apple has cut the people who make programming for its newer platforms: headset games, immersive films, audio workouts. It has not cut the engineers who build the devices those programmes run on. Apple TV+, the largest content operation of all, has not been touched in either round, at least as far as has been reported.
What to watch
There are three tests. The first is output. The service's appeal rests on a steady supply of new sessions. If new Time to Walk episodes slow, as Gurman expects, subscribers will notice well before Apple says anything.
The second is where Fitness+ ends up on the org chart. If it moves inside Health, it stops being a subscription that has to justify its own costs and becomes part of what the Watch does.
The third is Apple's next results, expected at the end of October, which will be the first under Mr Ternus. Apple does not report headcount or costs by service, so the cuts will not show up line by line. Operating expenses will show whether this was trimming at the edges or the start of a tighter budget. A few hundred jobs at a company of 166,000 is a rounding error. The signal is which teams Apple chose.
The Fitness+ layoffs, the teams affected and Mark Gurman's characterisation of them as the start of deeper cost-cutting are from Bloomberg's Power On newsletter of 20 September 2026, as reported by MacRumors (Joe Rossignol, 20 September) and 9to5Mac (Chance Miller, 21 September); 9to5Mac is also the source for the November 2025 review of the service and the move of its leadership to Eddy Cue and Sumbul Desai. The August reductions — more than 200 roles, roughly half in the Vision Pro group and half across Siri and the Intelligent Systems Experience team — are from Bloomberg's report of 21 August 2026 as carried by 9to5Mac, which also published Apple's statement. The 166,000 headcount figure and the timing of the chief executive change are as reported by Fortune on 24 August; Mr Ternus's start date of 1 September is as reported by The Mac Observer. Revenue figures are from Apple's results release of 30 July 2026. Fitness+ launch dates and US prices are from Apple's announcements as compiled in the service's Wikipedia entry. Apple has not commented publicly on the Fitness+ cuts, and the number of people affected has not been disclosed. The analysis is our own.
Topics technologyapplesubscriptions
