Apple is reportedly letting go 100 employees in its digital services group, as it looks to revaluate the company’s priorities.
The majority of the losses are said to have been made to the team overseeing the Apple Books app, with other service team and engineering roles also being cut.
While the tech giant continues to hire with more than 60 fully remote jobs advertised at Apple in August alone, it has also had several rounds of job cuts in other areas of the business during the course of 2024.
End of the Story for Apple Books?
The news of Apple’s latest round of job cuts was originally reported by Bloomberg, who had spoken to “people with knowledge of the matter” (although representatives from Apple had declined to comment when approached).
It says that the affected employees – who work in the company’s services group – were notified on Tuesday, August 28th.
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It is understood that the team in charge of the Apple Books app will bear the brunt of the cuts, with the one managing Apple News also set to lose individuals.
Apple Books, in particular, has been singled out as not a business priority for the tech giant. According to Bloomberg, Apple does not see the provision of audiobooks and ebooks as as a major part of its services line-up. It also says, however, that Books is still expected to get new features over time, so there isn’t a plan to remove it entirely from Apple’s suite of apps just yet.
Bite in the Apple
While Apple has traditionally been a stable employer that has been relatively immune from large-scale layoffs made by tech companies in the post-pandemic era, the last 12 months has seen that picture change with several rounds of redundancies.
The most significant came in April when more than 700 employees across eight locations were let go following the cancellation of ‘Project Titan’ – the company’s multi-billion dollar self-driving initiative.
In the same month, the company reportedly made numerous roles redundant within its corporate retail teams. And this time last year reports emerged of around 100 contractor roles across several regions being cut.
2024’s Run of Redundancies
2024 has been another rocky year in the industry for job stability with a number of big names making substantial cuts.
As recently as this month, the likes of Formlabs and Sonos put dozens of its workers out of a job. While Intel announced a massive layoff of 15,000 employees at the start of August, citing dwindling revenues and rising costs as the reason.
The list of big name job slashers goes on: Dyson (1,000), Bell (400), EA (670), Bumble (350), Sony (900), Expedia (1,500), Cisco (4,250), PayPal (2,500), Microsoft (1,900), eBay (1,000). And Amazon has announced hundreds of job cuts to different arms of its business, too.
In addition to the rising costs blamed by some companies for the losses, the disruptive use of generative AI tools like ChatGPT are also having a significant effect on the tech job market — Dell’s recent cull being a prime example.
