News details of where the cuts to Apple’s Project Titan self-driving car team will fall emerged Wednesday. Most of the 190 staff being laid of are engineers, according to document filed by the company.
Layoffs Happening Mid-April
The redundancies were originally disclosed in January 2019. A new filing from Apple to the California Employment Development Department detailed that 38 engineering program managers, 33 hardware engineers, 31 product design engineers and 22 software engineers.
Employees based at Apple premises in Sunnyvale and Santa Clara, California will be laid off. Apple expanded into those areas in 2014, the same year it launched its self-driving car division (via San Francisco Chronicle). The layoffs will take affect on April 16th, 2019. Other Project Titan staff are to be transferred elsewhere in Apple, but not made redundant.
This is not the first time Apple has cut back on Project Titan workers, it also did so in 2017. When this round of layoffs were confirmed last month, an spokesperson said that the company “continue to believe there is a huge opportunity with autonomous systems.”
😴 No, really? Apple should stick to toys like phones, obvious they can’t put the big boy pants on. Maybe they got transferred to the flexible screen dept. to play catch-up. 📺