Looks like Apple is shutting down its self-driving car project as the Cupertino-based tech giant has started firing employees. One can now assume that Apple is cutting the budget of experimental projects as the company has recently faced slow iPhone sales in the last quarter.
As of now, Apple has announced that it will layoff 190 Project Titan members (Apple’s autonomous car division) from Santa Clara and Sunnyvale centers, as reported in a letter sent to the California Employment Development Department. The layoffs will take effect from April 16th.
According to the details mentioned in the letter, this firing wave in the company will mostly affect engineers and around 124 of them will lose their jobs. Moreover, the details of the layoffs of engineers are as follow; 38 engineering programme managers, 33 hardware engineers, 31 product design engineers and 22 software engineers.
This isn’t the first time that California’s tech giant has fired people, previously in 2016, Apple had cut down hundreds of jobs in the self-driving car division. Whereas, some of the Project Titan members were already moving to other divisions of the company to support AI and other relevant departments.
Last month, Lynx Equity Strategies wrote an analysis which speculated that Apple’s self-driving car division is shutting down. The report stated; “A sudden and significant shortfall in iPhone revenue is causing a level of distress within Apple that is forcing it to make hard choices.”
Well, there’s still hope for Apple’s autonomous car division as in May 2018, with 55 self-driving cars and 83 drivers, the company reached the second highest number of self-driving cars in California after General Motor’s Cruise, which had 104 vehicles at that time.
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