For a couple of years now, it hasn’t really been much of a secret that Apple could be working on a self-driving car, or at least tech that could help self-driving cars. More recently it was suggested that due to poor iPhone sales, Apple’s budget for other projects was reduced and that they could be looking to scrap or scale back its self-driving car program.
Apple had sort of confirmed it by claiming that they were reshuffling their employees, but now we know for a fact that layoffs did indeed occur. This is according to a report from the SF Chronicle where the point to a letter sent to the California Employment Development Department confirming that 190 employees in Santa Clara and Sunnyvale who were part of the self-driving program had been laid off.
These layoffs are expected to take effect on the 16th of April and consists of engineers from a variety of backgrounds, such as program managers, hardware engineers, software engineers, and product design engineers, just to name a few. It is unclear as to what this means for Apple’s plans and if the program had been scrapped entirely, or if it could simply be put on the backburner until things are looking better.
Apple has been pretty mum about what they are working on with regards to self-driving cars, so, unfortunately, these layoffs mean that the public may never know what Apple could have been up to or what they might have developed so far.
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