Apple’s ‘last resort’ is here: Why the company laid off 700 employees 

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In May 2023, the tech industry was reeling under a spate of layoffs. Thousands of workers were laid off by tech companies — big and small. Amazon, Meta, Google, Microsoft, Intel — you name it and employees from these and other companies were asked to look for new gigs. Yet, one name remained conspicuously absent from the list: Apple. Around that time, Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, in an interview with CNBC was asked why the company hadn’t gone down the layoffs road. “I view that as a last resort and, so, mass layoffs is not something that we’re talking about at this moment,” Cook said. That last resort is here as Apple has confirmed 700 employees have been laid off.

Why Apple didn’t bite the bullet earlier

During the Covid-19 pandemic that ravaged and disrupted life across the world, tech companies went in an overdrive mode when it came to hiring employees. Between 2020-2022, Microsoft hired close to 58,000 employees. In Facebook’s history, 2020 and 2021 were the biggest years of expansion as far as hiring employees was concerned. Alphabet — Google’s parent company — has always been big on hiring as its employee strength has grown 10% every year since 2013. Amazon, for multiple reasons, went on a hiring overdrive and added a mammoth 810,000 employees for its warehouses and corporate offices, as per a report by CNBC. Apple? A rather conservative number in comparison as in 2020 and 2021, the company added 17,000 employees for retail and corporate divisions. So Apple didn’t grow as much in terms of employee strength compared to other big tech companies, thus didn’t have to resort to sacking employees. Hiring efficiently meant that Apple wasn’t forced to let go off employees.

Apple employees have felt the impact but not the worst kind. According to a report by Bloomberg, in February 2023, Apple started taking cost-cutting measures. For instance, bonuses for corporate employees were delayed. Apple employees were told to take approvals from senior vice presidents for any additional costs incurred. Travel budgets were slashed for employees and required strict approvals.

So, why is Apple laying off employees now?
Long-running and expensive projects were not going anywhere and Apple decided to abandon them. One of them was the secretive Project Titan project which was responsible for development of the Apple Car. According to Bloomberg, in February 2024, Jeff Williams, chief operating officer, Apple and Kevin Lynch, project head, held a meeting which lasted less than 15 minutes. The duo informed employees that the project was being gutted and the teams would move to other divisions. There were reportedly 2,000 employees working on the project. Apple did tell employees that they may be laid off if they couldn’t fit in other teams.

The other project was the development of MicroLED displays for Apple Watch. Due to production issues, Apple reportedly decided to shelve it and the employees in these teams were also impacted and asked to leave. In total, it is reported than close to 700 employees across teams have been asked to leave.