Apple cuts 600 jobs after dropping self-driving car plans
bbc.com
bbc.com
Kinda is, if you’re going for the pun
It’s entirely likely people on these products don’t easily match internally.
The job market for people capable of working on Apple high end R&D is also likely much better at matching then Apples internal HR, simply because the market has so many more openings.
Classic instance of the sunken cost fallacy fallacy (not a typo). They prefer to cut their losses and forget about how much they spent recruiting those people.
Keeping them might seem wasteful on the short term, but such skilled workers could likely be made profitable in a big R&D powerhouse.
But the real cost is damaging their reputation among future candidates and current employees, and lowering their perceived value as an employer.
For the most skilled and efficient engineers, choosing to work for big tech is always a tradeoff, a company like Apple is usually very appealing for the most risk-averse.
In this particular case, GP posits that fallacy is itself a fallacy, insomuch as there is no greater opportunity the company could pursue which required laying those employees off. The reputational harm done, among other things, is a hidden cost not reflected in the numbers of their salaries, and surely they could have participated in other R&D efforts, or something along those lines.
The Sunken cost fallacy would be to retain those people because of the costs irrevocably incurred (sunk) recruiting them, employing them to date, etc. Apple are (apparently following a theoretical economics position) considering the prospective costs going forward of keeping them, when they no longer have an obvious future revenue stream, and would still generate additional redeployment/retraining costs
I would love regulations to make it impossible to eliminate jobs unless the company is bankrupt. Considering how much is of your life is dependent on having an employer, it shouldn't be this easy for a company to toy with that. More so when a company has so much profits.
They could totally offer other positions within the company. If needed support people learning new technologies or languages. Or use these people's expertise to start new projects. but firing it totally unnecessary.
This is how you zombify your economy.
Is the threat of financial ruin or the threat of starving worth the advantage that you yourself are getting?
Inside the current "free market" do you really have the agency, choice or leverage to choose a different economic relationship with your employer if you would want one?
False dichotomy. There are a myriad of options between the status quo and transitioning to a Southern European-style employment model.
> Inside the current "free market" do you really have the agency, choice or leverage to choose a different economic relationship with your employer if you would want one?
The solution isn't in making the current economy sclerotic, but in better distributing its gains. Destroying the gains just makes everyone poorer. And when that happens, empirically, inequality goes up, not down.
It's not that it's too easy—it's that it's too impactful.
The real answer is social safety nets. If you want to protect people, address the root problem that your life is dependent on having an employer. Proper unemployment or UBI plus universal healthcare makes losing a job annoying ("ugh now I have to find another one") vs. terrifying.
Jack up the corporate tax rate (on revenue) to pay for it—which should be a wash after reducing the load of severance, healthcare benefits, etc. that companies are paying today.
Better worker protections like the UK/Europe are mechanisms too—notice periods, guaranteed severance, etc.—but have their own chilling effects.
This has the added benefit of reducing the barriers of entry for individuals: people are more likely to leave bad jobs or pursue their own opportunities, which in turn should drive subsequent job creation.
the last time I was laid off, it was a relief. The project was clearly failing and the work had become drudgery. When we all got laid off and given severance money, we all went to a bar and celebrated. Then we all went and got other jobs.
Remember, the unemployment rate is under 4% right now.
Moreover, 600 is a lot of human beings, and it follows a recent trend of tech companies' mass layoffs from which Apple has mostly avoided.
I really wish you and others would not equate layoffs with "trimming fat". It's kind of disgusting, and especially when these huge corps are still full of others doing plenty of non-meaningful work. Plenty of layoffs are illogical and due to internal politics.
I doubt they have much need for mechanical engineers, drivers, mechanics, etc. Still unpleasant for those laid off, but I like seeing companies take these kinds of risks.
It’s absurd to describe this as a mass layoff even relative to the 5,000 people Apple employed for this project alone. If a company can’t lay off a few hundred people after cancelling a major project, we’ve effectively banned it from taking risks.
It’s clearly being criticised. If a culture rejects a company hiring five thousand and taking a bet with them for a decade, only for the bet to fail and six hundred be let go, that’s problematic.
Especially given that the car project was apparently 2000 people from the project, not being able to find other positions for about a quarter of those people is I think valid.
I mean yeah it is unfortunate for the people affected, but projects are canceled. It is entirely possible, especially given some of the unique skills needed specifically for a car, there are people who just won't have a place anywhere else.
That would be msft currently.
So yeah, the fact that they are relatively "struggling" and aren't the top company anymore has some relevance.
It would be a different story if they suddenly dropped a magnitude or more, but going from first to second has basically no relevance on the content of the comment. It would have read the exact same if it said “second biggest company”.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-04-04/apple-cut... (archive: https://archive.ph/MeaiY)
Vehicles are doing more and more processing - the work of servers. Distributing moving servers around the world to process data at that specific location is useful and becoming more and more so.
Yes there are some incidental parts that Apple has skill at making. Perhaps they should provide touch-panels for the car controls? The interface would be better than what's out there.
The most significant evidence that Apple isn't a car manufacturer is, that they have just thrown up their hands and cancelled the project, with essentially the defense that "We don't know how to do anything involved in making a car" e.g. distribution, manufacturing, certifications and on and on.
They contain computing devices, but so does my toothbrush and kettle - they are defined by the main thing they do like cars - which move people around in comfort and safety.
Fun quip, but it is the second part of the GP's sentence that's key: "... and Apple is not willing to transform itself into a car company."
Apple is an electronics company in the same sense that Louis Vuitton is a handbag manufacturer. Apple is a fashion company.
Much rather this than releasing yet another half-assed, techno-heavy, EV.
600 staff had a great time getting paid to muck around on a dev project at Apple. Priceless.
Obviously they would have had to create a simpler project before the fsd car. Just like they did the iPod before they did the iPhone.
I highly doubt the problem was, can Apple build a car? They have enough money that they could probably hire the people to do just about anything they wanted to try.
Not really sure how you simplify making a car enough to make it worth getting into the market at all in the first place.
But actually entering the market and getting Apple like margins and volumes... Very doubtful. Cars are significantly more expensive than even the VR headset or top of the line computers.
More like, it would take too long to become profitable, and this company is not interested in long-term goals.
Not interested in the long term?
If some of us have less confidence than others in their prognostications, well, there are reasons.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-03-03/why-wa...
Apple’s Car Was Doomed by Its Lofty Ambitions to Outdo Tesla
And repeated numerous times.
The article was written by the same Bloomberg journalist who broke the story that the project was canceled.
Apple wanted to launch true self-driving transportation. That would have been revolutionary and when they started, many people thought that was a goal that could be realized in 5-10 years. Since then we have learned that self-driving and much more complex and harder to get right.
Apple seems to have tried some different approaches to the problem, but eventually they decided it was not worth pursuing and cancelled the project. It was inevitable that they would have to lay off some people with skills that could not translate to other products. What is amazing is that they seem to have been able to retain 70% of that team.
Some more discussion:
> "It feels more like a shift of strategic focus into other new emerging areas like AI," he adds.
Be mindful when taking your next job in the AI goldrush.
If we have to declare that self driving cars “are” a single thing, I’d say it’s manufacturing, not AI.
Instead of autonomous cars, we get generative AI out of this last rush of AI advances. Today, when people talk about "AI" as a startup they are talking about using this already existing technology.
Self-driving was always a speculation that the science would advance into engineering within a sm timeframe, which is always a risky bet. I was hugely skeptical, told everyone that would listen that I didn't believe for a second that Musk would ever deliver on self driving. But I'm far more bullish on AI, we actually do have something new here, it just takes a lot of skill, talent, and discovery to deploy it in useful ways.
Then there are those who are using existing generative AI to book revenue today. This includes OpenAI, and other generative AI providers, but it also includes companies like Accenture, which booked $600M in AI consulting last quarter and expects it to continue growing. There's GitHub co-pilot, which is booking revenue.
To be fair, that was almost true. Waymo is doing well, Mobileye is looking good in demos, and even Tesla has a solid L2 system now.
It seems inevitable that this will hit a really dramatic exponential growth phase within the next 2-3 years.
Unless you limit "Self driving" cars to L2, there's no supporting evidence indicating anything like a breakthrough.
Tesla is currently at zero on that dimension. They might get it above zero and grow rapidly in 2-3 years, but I'd give it very low odds.
Waymo OTOH, has increased to 3 fairly difficult areas. It seems extremely likely that their growth rate will increase dramatically sometime within the next 2-3 years. If they don't, there are other competitors with strong technology that might move ahead.
No, it was not even close to "almost true" except for hype from the various hypesters.
Waymo currently operates in TWO areas, not three. Phoenix and San Fran are not "fairly difficult." Come to Michigan in the winter for difficult. Come to Denver in the winter. Waymo has (wisely) selected areas that are either very simple in layout, that have sympathetic governments, or both. And what other competitors are out there with "strong technology"?
Robotaxis are a novelty. Just like the monorail at Disneyland.
The car project has always seemed like a "we have too much money" project. Or a good idea from someone who never leaves their perfect spaceship campus.
Sure, but when it launched, and while it was developed, this was not even remotely considered a core competency of the company. Which was my point. That core competency did not exist when the iPod was being worked on (and presumably could have been canned). And that’s the same case here.
> An iPhone/iPad is a variation of a laptop at the end of the day.
That’s an extreme stretch. To the point where Apple itself disagrees with how they’re being segmented. If it was just a variation, you’d have seen a combination of product lines and features at this point.
More to the point in a discussion about cars, they mostly share the same hardware as well. None of them have a suspension, or a motor, or wheels, or....
Hell, some new cars are literally driven by a computer, both in the AI sense and in that your steering wheel movements are not directly connected to your front wheels. An EPU for a long time has controlled how an engine runs, which is a literal computer. New cars’ components are connected with automotive-grade Ethernet. They use a screen to interface with “apps” like media playback and navigation. They connect to external services and devices like your phone.
What, exactly, makes it not a computer, if we’re defining the term loosely enough to encompass practically all devices Apple makes right now?
If you don’t have any actual reasons or rebuttals, then there’s nothing left to discuss.