Apple Lays Off 614 Employees from Cancelled Car Project

Apple has initiated layoffs for 614 employees who were part of its now-defunct Apple Car project, marking the company's first significant job cuts since the onset of the pandemic. The tech giant, based in California, managed to avoid major layoffs that affected other tech companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and Alphabet, largely due to its more conservative approach to headcount growth during the pandemic.

The affected employees, who worked across eight different facilities in Santa Clara, were officially informed on 28 March, with the changes set to take effect from 27 May onwards, according to a WARN notice posted by the state of California. Since the cancellation of the Apple Car project in February, the company has been redirecting most of its resources towards its generative AI efforts.

The Apple Car project, also known as Project Titan, was part of the company's special projects group and employed over 2,000 people at its peak. The team was tasked with developing an electric autonomous vehicle, but faced challenges in getting the autonomous technology to function properly and struggled to find manufacturing partners willing to work on Apple's terms. Additionally, the company encountered difficulties in securing suitable battery technology for the car, despite making significant progress in designing the silicon that would power the vehicle.

The eliminated positions primarily include machine shop managers, hardware engineers, and product design engineers, whose skill sets were difficult for Apple to reallocate due to their automotive engineering backgrounds. The company is currently assessing which aspects of the Apple Car project can still be utilised, with the new CarPlay experience being a direct result of the efforts put into Project Titan.

Apple is also leveraging its AI advancements from the project to catch up in the generative AI space, following the launch of ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Microsoft Co-Pilot, and Mistral AI – all large language model-based chat assistants. The company is expected to launch a revamped iOS 18 with generative AI at its core, along with a significant redesign that could be the biggest change to the iPhone user interface since iOS 7.

To further its generative AI efforts, Apple has been actively acquiring companies and is simultaneously in talks with OpenAI and Google to license their foundational models for cloud-based processing. The company's generative AI researchers have made impressive gains in recent months, and Apple is also working on a personal home robot that may incorporate some of the autonomous driving technology developed for the Apple Car project.