According to the most recent WARN report released by the Employment Development Department of California (EDD), over 700 people at Apple have recently lost their jobs. The majority of those let go were employed by Apple at its Santa Clara headquarters, with 371 of them coming from the division that was mostly responsible for the company’s now-closed electric car project.
Companies are required by California law to submit a report to the EDD under the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) program for each location where layoffs are occurring.
Layoffs occurred at eight Apple locations in Santa Clara, including the main automobile office. One of these locations was involved in the company’s in-house MicroLED display project, which was apparently abandoned in March owing to financial and technical issues. The company had hoped to manufacture its own screens for smartwatches, Macs, and iPhones, but that is obviously not going to happen anytime soon.
Apple’s original car ambitions were to build a fully autonomous vehicle without pedals and a steering wheel, until it decided to develop an electric vehicle instead. A previous Bloomberg report said Apple canceled the initiative internally called “Project Titan” after investing billions of dollars and a decade into it. The employees who were developing the vehicle were given the chance to transfer to Apple’s other divisions, including its teams that are reportedly working on artificial intelligence and home robotics. But based on Apple’s WARN report, it wasn’t able to re-integrate everyone into the company.
Apple is believed to be in the very early stages of developing personal robotics for people’s homes. One of the machines that’s currently a work-in-progress is a robot that follows people around, while the other is a table-top device that uses a robot to move a display around, according to another Bloomberg report. The company’s work on personal robotics is part of its efforts, which also include the Vision Pro, to find new sources of revenue.
