Apple has taken the rare step of laying off around 100 people from its digital services division including the Apple News and Apple Books apps as the iPhone maker reshuffles its priorities to focus more on artificial intelligence, according to a report.
The affected employees, among them several engineers, were informed of the decision on Tuesday, according to Bloomberg News.
Apple Books, which lets users buy and download e-books and audiobooks, is considered less of a priority at the Cupertino, Calif.-based tech giant, people familiar with the matter told Bloomberg News.
The layoffs also affected personnel at Apple News, the news aggregation app that curates articles from various publishers into a single, personalized feed — though sources told Bloomberg that the service remains a priority for the company.
Affected workers were told they have 60 days to find another position within the company before being terminated.
Apple declined to comment on the Bloomberg News report.
The company had approximately 161,000 full-time equivalent employees as of Sept. 30, 2023, according to its latest annual report.
Apple, the world’s richest company with a market cap of $3.47 trillion, has rarely had layoffs in the past. This year, however, there have been at least four rounds of job cuts.
In the spring, Apple cut hundreds of jobs after it shut down its self-driving car project.
It has previously suspended work on its next high-end Vision headset and shuttered a project to design and develop its own smartwatch displays earlier this year, according to media reports.
Other tech companies have laid off workers on a far greater scale than Apple.
Since the start of the year, tech companies worldwide have shed more than 134,000 jobs, according to the tracker site Layoffs.fyi.
LinkedIn laid off 660 employees while Intel laid off more than 15,000 workers.
Apple snapped out of a prolonged sales slump during its most recent quarter as the trendsetting company prepares to launch into the artificial intelligence craze with an arsenal of new technology that’s expected to juice demand for its next iPhone.
The fiscal third-quarter results announced earlier this month covered an April-June period that’s typically a sluggish stretch for Apple as its loyal customer bases awaits the next version of the iPhone that’s traditionally unveiled shortly after Labor Day.
Even so, Apple boosted its sales from a year ago — a welcome reversal of fortune on the heels of five consecutive quarters of year-over-year revenue declines.
With Post Wires