Apple Just Conducted a Rare Round of Layoffs. Here Are the Teams and Roles Affected. Apple has over 160,000 employees.
By Sherin Shibu Edited by Melissa Malamut
Key Takeaways
- A new Bloomberg report shows that Apple laid off about 100 employees on Tuesday.
- The layoffs impacted roles in the services division, including teams working on Apple Books and Apple News.
- The services category was the second-best performing part of Apple in net sales in Q3 2024, second only to the iPhone, which brought in over $39 billion.
Apple has laid off about 100 employees who worked on products like the Apple Books app and Apple News, Bloomberg reported Tuesday night.
Apple informed the affected employees on Tuesday. The company has yet to make the move public. The layoffs impacted roles in the digital services group, including some engineering positions, but the team working on the Apple Books app and Apple Bookstore faced the most cuts.
Apple has given some employees affected by layoffs 60 days to find another position internally before being let go, per the Bloomberg report.
According to Apple's latest earnings report, released earlier this month, the services division brought in over $24 billion in net sales in the third quarter of 2024 ending June 29. It was the second-best performing part of Apple in net sales, second only to the iPhone, which brought in over $39 billion.
The earnings report showed that services brought in more sales than the Mac (over $7 billion), iPad (over $7.1 billion), and wearables, home, and accessories (over $8 billion) divisions combined.
Apple store. (Photo by: Bob Henry/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
Apple layoffs are relatively rare. Apple CEO Tim Cook said in February 2023 that he viewed layoffs as "a last resort kind of thing."
"You can never say never," Cook said at the time. "We want to manage costs in other ways to the degree that we can."
Related: Apple Is Expanding What The iPhone Can Do. Here's What's Changing Right Away.
Apple did lay off at least 600 employees in April after canceling its 10-year electric car project and ending its effort to make smartwatch screens in-house in February and March. Some of the 2,000 people working on the self-driving, electric car project moved to Apple's AI division.
Apple had over 161,000 full-time employees as of 2023.
