California has announced a workforce reduction, affecting 614 employees across eight facilities in Santa Clara County. The layoffs will take effect on May 27.
This development follows an earlier round of job cuts where 121 workers in San Diego County were notified of their impending termination by April 26. These layoffs arrived at Apple’s decision to halt its ambitious project of developing an electric car, a venture it had pursued for a decade.
Apple (Credits: Yahoo)
Bloomberg’s reports in February made it clear Apple’s shift away from its electric car initiative, a move that caught the company’s Special Projects Group, a team of about 2,000 employees, off guard.
The announcement revealed that these employees would transition from working on the car project to focusing on artificial intelligence technologies. Apple, headquartered in Cupertino within Santa Clara County, has remained silent regarding these layoffs, declining to comment when approached by CNBC News.
DOJ and Apple (Credits: LinkedIn)
Simultaneously, Apple finds itself in a major antitrust challenge spearheaded by the Department of Justice (DOJ), which scrutinizes the company’s stronghold over the smartphone market.
The DOJ contends that Apple’s integrated iPhone ecosystem has cemented its market dominance, alleging that the tech giant has engineered services and products that perform optimally within its proprietary systems, thereby maintaining its superiority across various technological platforms.
