600+ announced today plus the 200+ who were layed off in 2019.
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Apple Lays Off 600+ Employees After Canceling Car Project
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
No one likes hearing about layoffs but is 600 a lot for a company the size of Apple? Last year the company I work for laid off ~8,000.
Why? Is Apple entitled to entering the car market? Don't they have enough money?
An internal program is canceled at a large Global Corporation with approximately 161,000 employees. The company absorbs all but 600 individuals.
This is Business 101. It’s not about hugs, holding hands, and singing kumbaya.
This is Business 101. It’s not about hugs, holding hands, and singing kumbaya.
The should’ve employed some of them to make an updated, WiFi 6E/7 version of the AirPort devices…
Microsoft used to do this all the time as well. Really forward thinking but sometimes too soon to have a viable market. Not sure why Apple didn’t see this through. Seems to be the right time… unless they really were going for steering wheel-less, self-drive. Yuck.
Completely different goals apparently. Honestly I think Apple is silly to not at least pivot to software they could license to others instead of scrapping the project.
IMO it's a series of events that have caused all these layoffs. Besides the ones mentioned above, I would add the earthquake in Taiwan to be the final strike. There's going to be long delays in production of chips and devices.
Not a good picture.
But it may be a good time to focus on software development while this other situation returns to normal.
Not a good picture.
But it may be a good time to focus on software development while this other situation returns to normal.
Not to mention Huawei's EV
Huawei’s EV Is China’s No. 1 Among Upstarts for Second Month
Aito, the car brand that uses some software from Huawei Technologies Co., is China’s best-selling electric vehicle among EV upstarts for a second straight month, a sign how far Chinese smartphone makers have come in their endeavor to take on some of the nation’s brightest automobile hopefuls.
www.bloomberg.com
Apple couldn't even create Air Power. Let that sink in. Oh yea an Autonomous Car...EPIC FAIL.
Hardly. Tesla is one of the first to market with a mass production EV, yes, but that hardly means late comers are all Tesla copies. There are lots of Chinese EVs sold in Europe and the fact that they haven’t been sued into the ground by existing players for patent infringement says a lot. That’s not to mention even lots of Teslas models are using Chinese EV battery tech.
Apple’s goal was likely a completely different automotive experience with full automation but found the tech wasn’t mature enough. Most of the value add they can do aside from that would mostly be to the infotainment system, which they already do well with CarPlay. Without some significant differentiating factor it’s hardly going earn the kind of margins they currently do with their devices and services.
And frankly, I’m not gonna argue EVs have flopped. But, they haven’t taken the market by storm like promised by various automakers. Reminds me a lot of the hype by telecoms about 5G.
In fact, quite a few automakers are backing away from fully-electric vehicles and going with plug-in hybrids instead.
As a layman, this seems to be the smarter approach, as it theoretically lowers the barrier to entry: cost.
Apple has 160,000 employees.
So... percentage wise it's very small, especially compared to the mass layoffs of Amazon, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Microsoft, IBM, Meta, SAP, google, Zoom, Dell, UPS, T-Mobile, Cisco, Sony, PayPal, eBay, Spotify, Nokia, Qualcomm, Vodaphone, DocuSign, HP, Twitter, Intel, etc.
Certainly sums up products like Vision Pro.
That’s the same argument people made with licensing macOS to makers of Mac clones. What ended up happening was much smaller profits from each license that also ate into Mac sales. If Apple had something worth licensing they could very well have gotten the suppliers to make an Apple branded car (not like there isn’t an abundance of suppliers at this point unlike 10 years ago) that they could sell for much more money instead.
But like what are they going to do the next 2 months?
We shall see. But I'm not sure you are right about lower barrier to entry as evidenced by the startups and non-car manufacturing conglomerates who have gone from never making a car to producing and selling EVs in just a handful of years. I suspect that a good hybrid engine is vastly more complicated than designing an electric motor and connecting it to batteries. Basically the barriers to entry in the car market seemed nearly insurmountable until EVs. Now we've got Xiaomi making EVs (and if you are on MacRumors you would know Xiaomi from its blatant copies of iPhone in the cell market) as an example. And there are many more.
And as for cost, Tesla's average vehicle price is probably below the average new ICE car sold in the US (about $48,000).
Apple has demonstrated remarkable incompetence and lack of foresight, but perhaps they have created a thick patent portfolio to license out and to sue people.
Last edited:
The same as they did the past two months. Show up, get paid, and then go on strike because they're not paid for their coffee breaks?
Apple needed to trim this.
If I seem jaded, I am. 2000 (TWO THOUSAND) workers couldn't get ONE car designed?
WTF have they been doing?
Gas prices just jumped to their highest level ever in Canada. I want an electric car!