Apple lays off over 600 employees after shuttering car project

Apple is laying off 614 workers in California, according to a new state filing, the company’s first significant round of job cuts since the Covid pandemic.

The affected Apple employees worked at eight different facilities in Santa Clara, according to the WARN notice posted by California. The workers were officially informed of the cuts on March 28 and the changes are effective May 27, the filing said.

Apple hasn’t been forced into the same kind of downsizing as its tech peers, largely because the iPhone maker grew more slowly than rivals during the pandemic.

The filing comes weeks after Apple canceled a long-running project to build an electric, self-driving car in a team called the Special Projects Group. While the California notice didn’t mention the specific projects where jobs are being cut, none of the locations in the filing are at Apple’s Cupertino headquarters, but at smaller, satellite offices more likely to house secretive initiatives.

Positions that were cut include machine shop managers, hardware engineers and product design engineers, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

An Apple representative declined to comment.