Apple lays off 600 employees in California after cancelling electric car project

Apple lays off more than 600 employees from California

Apple has laid off more than 600 employees from the state of California.

Some of the affected workers were reportedly from the company’s secretive electric car project, which shuttered in February.

This marks the company’s first major round of job cuts since the Covid-19 pandemic.

Apple lays off 614 California employees

According to Apple’s filing under the Worker Adjustment and Restraining Notification Act (WARN), the tech company notified 614 employees about the layoff on 28 March.

The affected workers were from eight offices in the city of Santa Clara, but it’s unclear which department or project they were from.

Bloomberg reported that 87 of the axed employees worked at an address matching that of an Apple facility for its “next-generation screen development”.

The other workers were from buildings related to Apple’s secretive car project, which it cancelled about a month ago.

San Francisco Chronicle reported that the affected roles include “machine shop” managers, hardware engineers, and product design engineers.

The full scale of the retrenchment, however, remains a mystery as Apple is only legally bound to announce job cuts in California.

Layoffs came shortly after Apple cancelled electric car project

The layoffs come slightly more than a month after Apple cancelled its plans to build electric cars.

Rumours about the secretive project surfaced about a decade ago in 2014, with Apple recruiting experts from automotive companies.

Known as Project Titan, Apple’s electric cars were meant to rival those of Tesla.

Also read: Dell announces layoffs after revenue drops due to fall in demand for PCs

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Featured image adapted from Apple.