These were people on a team of 2000 devoted to the Car project which was recently cancelled. The ones laid off were likely those with very car-specific skills like automotive engineers and mechanics that could not easily transfer to Apple's other products.
600 out of 2000 is not too bad when ending a big project like that. the headline could easily read: Apple retains 70% of workforce from cancelled project.
Those contract positions are certainly not car related.
I appreciate your dupe posts sometimes, but when the other posts have just a handful of comments (less than this thread at the time you commented), it seems like a bit of a red herring. What's the point?
Understood, not the best scenario on this one, but would have hoped the mods merged the threads by now as the story and the comments are on day-old news (of which there are a number of submissions of the same story). What was the point of posting the story again instead of just joining the discussion over there?
I wasn't aware of the other submissions. It would be fine if the threads were merged, but I feel like there's a materiality threshold under which it isn't worth their time to merge.
I think articles like this are published whenever a company files paperwork to do layoffs, which is only required above a certain threshold. It's true that Apple is a large company, but if all of these layoffs are in the Bay Area that makes it a bit more material than if it were worldwide layoffs.
