“Apple will lay off 190 employees in Santa Clara and Sunnyvale in its self-driving car division, the company said,” Roland Li reports for The Same Francisco Chronicle.
“The layoffs were disclosed, along with new details, in a letter this month to the California Employment Development Department. CNBC reported last month that layoffs were occurring in the self-driving car division, known as Project Titan,” Li reports. “Tom Neumayr, an Apple spokesman, confirmed that the letter to the state referenced the same layoffs.”
“Most of the affected employees are engineers, including 38 engineering program managers, 33 hardware engineers, 31 product design engineers and 22 software engineers. The layoffs will take effect April 16, according to the filing,” Li reports. “Apple’s expansion into Santa Clara and Sunnyvale, which are close to the company’s headquarters in Cupertino, ramped up starting in 2014, according to property records and previous news reports. That was the same year the self-driving division was founded.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: As we wrote last month, we’d be more concerned if there weren’t any restructuring and refocusing under Project Titan’s new leadership.
Good luck to those affected.
SEE ALSO:
Apple sharply increases testing of autonomous vehicles on public roads – February 13, 2019
Titan: Apple’s secret autonomous vehicle project is much bigger than people think – January 25, 2019
Apple dismisses more than 200 employees from Project Titan autonomous vehicle project – January 24, 2019
Apple hires designer Andrew Kim away from Tesla – December 17, 2018
Apple Car rumor roundup: Project Titan and what it means – September 1, 2018
Ming-Chi Kuo: Apple to launch revolutionary Apple Car within 5-7 years – August 15, 2018
Doug Field, former Tesla engineering chief, returns to Apple – August 10, 2018
Apple’s Project Titan is still a go, says analyst – June 28, 2018
Apple’s autonomous vehicle fleet grows to 62 vehicles in California – May 29, 2018
Apple’s autonomous vehicle project may be closer to fruition than it appears – May 25, 2018
Apple’s Bob Mansfield reboots Apple Car project, lays off several dozen employees – September 10, 2016
Apple hires founder of QNX with Apple Car project increasing focus on self-driving software – July 28, 2016
Apple taps Bob Mansfield to oversee Apple Car project – July 25, 2016
Will the engineers be allowed to transfer to the dongle division?
There’s probably a more urgent need in the emojis division. Only 0.1% of users plug anything in to their computers (what’s a computer?) now, don’t they?
Huh? The sarcasm tag disappeared.
The profit margin is HUGE on dongles.
Every Mac I buy, I spend another 10% of dongles to connect external hard drives and monitors.
I’m very sorry for these engineers and others. Another sign to me of poor management and design. Another of Tim’s main projects that is fading away because of poor results.
If you think Apple’s only had failed products under Tim, think again.
This is a major problem. This project has failed?
Tim needs to look for an exit. He needs to talk about retiring now
Who
Cares.
Why lay them off? Maybe they could make.. you know… Macintoshes?
Apple was never EVER going to do a self driving vehicle. They just couldn’t take the risk. Imagine the media frenzy when the inevitable accidents occur. Or an ‘icar’ kills a child. Apple would implode. The current leadership just aren’t capable of the jump and risk to do this. Even though it’s where the ‘pucks skating to’.
It’s another example of Tim’s lack of courage ( different to innovation ). Look at how they’ve now almost lost the home automation market. Instead of realising smart home adoption needs lots of smaller inexpensive ‘speakers’ almost in every room – Apple introduces a speaker that costs almost 10x an Echo dot. Madness. They needed courage to step away from the ‘luxury’ tag if they wanted to create a smart home ecosystem.
In 20 years Time, Tim’s legacy may well be losing the home auto market and the self drive market. Face ID will be long forgotten.
Real shame. Good luck to the employees.
Yes, this is valuable, thank you for highlighting the issue! Its significance is a major problem nowadays! Good luck to the employee!
Good. We’ve been promised flying cars since before the time of the Jetsons. This self-driving car stuff is such a distraction to what Apple should be working on, like where’s my robot AppleMaid? That project has been sidelined longer than the MacPro and Google Street View.
This is good trick for everyone
the photo
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