Apple is laying off over 600 workers in California, marking the company’s first big wave of post-pandemic job cuts. The iPhone maker notified 614 workers in multiple offices on March 28 that they were losing their jobs. As per reports to regional authorities, these layoffs will become effective on May 27.
The affected employees worked at eight offices in Santa Clara, as per the filings under the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act (WARN). There is no official comment from Apple regarding this layoff.
Apple’s EV program cancelled
This filing follows the cancellation of Apple’s long-time project to build an electric, self-driving car under the Special Projects Group. The EV program was intended to build a fully self-driving car, but the company continually shifted its plans and failed to produce a viable product amid staff turnover and missed deadlines. In addition to this, the company also announced the cancellation of the Apple Watch Ultra with MicroLED display.
There is no confirmation on the departments or projects the employees were involved in. The filing doesn’t include the Apple’s Cupertino headquarters but only smaller, satellite offices more likely to house secretive initiatives. As per reports, positions that were cut include machine shop managers, hardware engineers and product design engineers.
Why this layoff?
Apple remained a notable exception while other tech companies slashed their workforces over the past two years. There was a surge in hiring during the COVID-19 pandemic and big tech companies are still larger than they were before the pandemic. As the growth slowed down, companies are focusing on cutting costs. Earlier, we saw major tech layoffs announced by many companies.
Recently, Amazon announced a fresh round of layoffs, this time at its cloud computing business AWS. The video game maker Electronic Arts announced a layoff of nearly 5% of its workforce. Likewise, Sony said it was axing about 900 jobs in its PlayStation division, Cisco Systems revealed plans to lay off more than 4,000 workers and the social media company Snap, owner of Snapchat, announced it was slashing 10% of its global workforce.
