Apple is laying off more than 700 employees as the company has just canceled its Apple Car project and is also reconsidering the project to develop in-house Micro-LED displays. The layoffs became known after the company filed WARN notices in the state of California.
Layoffs at Apple affect projects like Apple Car and even Siri
As seen by 9to5Mac in the latest WARN report provided by the California Employment Development Department, the layoffs affect projects that have been in the news recently. For instance, Apple is laying off 58 employees from one of its offices in Santa Clara. This particular office belonged to LuxVue Technology, a company specializing in Micro-LED displays that Apple acquired in 2014.
In recent months, we’ve heard rumors about Apple canceling its plans to design and produce its own Micro-LED displays for the Apple Watch. Bloomberg recently reported that Apple gave up on the project because the screens “were difficult to produce in sufficient quantities.”
There are also more than 120 layoff notices filed by Apple in San Diego, which aligns with a January report about the company having recently closed a Siri data operations office located there. The office was responsible for evaluating Siri’s responses to users and for helping the company improve the platform’s accuracy.
At the time, Apple offered to relocate all affected employees to offices in Austin, Texas, if they agreed.
Unsurprisingly, the shutdown of the Apple Car project (internally known as Titan) also resulted in layoffs. Some of the offices listed by the records were used by Apple to develop and test its electric car. The company had been actively working on building a vehicle since 2014, but the challenges surrounding it made Apple give up on the project earlier this year.
9to5Mac’s take
For those unfamiliar, a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) aims to protect employees by requiring employers to give a 60-day notice to affected employees and both state and local representatives before a plant closing or mass layoff. This gives laid-off employees time to adjust and transition to new jobs.
Apple usually tries to reallocate employees from scrapped projects to other departments. Some of the engineers working on the Apple Car have been offered positions to work on AI-related features at Apple. However, not everyone has the chance to be reassigned since there were more than 2,000 people working on this specific project.
At the same time, the layoffs related to the Micro-LED team corroborate the rumors that Apple will take longer to build its own displays. As for the Siri-related layoffs, the move could be related to a major revamp of Apple’s virtual assistant coming with iOS 18.
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