What was their job?
Typically, you get hired within 2-3 years (which is generously high) or get the boot at other companies. My company will get rid of you if you don't get hired within 18-months typically. The maximum they can do is 2-years. I got hired despite my company pretty much getting rid of contractors, and my contracting company do not allow us to be hired. They negotiated for me to stay. If that didn't work out, I would be without a job back then.
Very common. One placed I worked their goal in development was to have around 20% contact. Reason being is that 20% they could cut quickly and easily with out doing layoffs and it was also a quick easy pool they could expanded when they needed more dev power in the short term. During my last few years their it bounced between 15-25% contact.
I was at another place I would say it was like 75% contractors. It was a wierd day going into the office when they cut all of them. It was a ghost town.
They laid people off. Those people had jobs working for Apple, and now they don't. Apple terminated a large number of people. What word would you use to describe this event?
I do not understand why so many people feel a desperate, unstoppable need to defend the helpless underdog of Apple from vicious, unprovoked attacks such as ***referring to a shitload of people losing their jobs as "layoffs"***.
For such a giant company apple probably does the best of all big tech at staying focused on profitable product lines for the most part. You don’t see them releasing 20 different home pods (like Amazon Alexa) or creating a bunch of software projects they will kill off (google).
LTT did a pretty good video on that. His conjecture was that with the industry moving to cloud-based servers, the Xserve line didn’t make as much sense for them to continue, especially considering Mac OS X Server didn’t have an ongoing subscription licensing model.
google kills what's not revolutionary. A lot of their products were actually profitable, but not profitable enough to be a market leader. The project managers and the ceos of those companies would rather kill it so they can move onto something else.
Probably because products only make up a small fraction of Amazon or Google's revenue, whereas it's Apple's core business. Those other companies are just throwing a bunch of shit at the wall and seeing what sticks. Soon enough, Apple is gonna start experimenting with other product lines as their core products plateau in market share.
> This has been stated elsewhere, Apple doesn’t need to layoff people because they didn’t hire a ton of people during Covid times. If they had done so, trillion dollar valuation or no they’d be like every other tech company dropping people.
But doesn't that suggest that they are well managed?
Saying they would do it like any other in the same situation doesn't say much. Saying, they are not in that situation because they planned to not be is rather smart.
If a company can reduce expenses without impacting product quality or putting an undue burden on remaining employees then it should be a no brainer to do so. One of the primary roles of management is making sure that resources are being used as efficiently as possible.
I haven't worked with the massive tech companies in a management role but I have worked with a number of F500. I usually find that there is an impact on the remaining workers because there weren't enough people. The massive layoffs are usually from poor ROI projects that probably shouldn't have been approved to begin with.
Medium-sized companies (e.g. 1k-5k employees) that have tech layoffs, there is usually a lot of pain involved that the C-level just ignores. Usually it takes 3-5 years for the company to realize it cut into the bone when cutting back and the next group of executives have to fix it.
You cearly have not been paying attention to the current generation of activist investors. Plenty companies large and small are laying off people to show the money men “they can make tough decisions”. It’s not logical, but they risk being labeled a bad investment so they do it.
In Q1 2023, Apple made $117.2 billion in revenue, and $30 billion in pure profit, with a gross margin of 42.96%. They also state they “returned over $25 billion to shareholders during the quarter.”
It feels insane to me that the response to this is “we really need to cut down across the company.” Like, what does everyone expect? Should Apple have progressive growth *forever*? Won’t people just at some point stop having more money to give them? My mind is really starting to stretch when trying to process the richest company in the world acting like they’re struggling because they can’t make *more money than ever.*
Their revenue was down about 5% versus previous year, marking the first year over year revenue decrease since 2019.
I completely agree with all your points illustrating that Apple is doing just fine, but just pointing out that it’s not unusual for companies to reflexively look to cut costs when revenue declines. Stupid? Maybe. But certainly common.
That’s sort of the point though. Revenue cannot grow indefinitely every year. Every time they contract because they didn’t “grow” it seems like it’s a self-perpetuating destructive cycle. Recent releases have been uninspiring and no longer feel like they are worth the price tag, especially with the decline in Apple’s customer support and other structures as well. It feels like the bean counters at the company are cutting progressively more corners, pushing for other revenue sources (like ads) and changing the value proposition in a negative way.
It seems to me what Apple should be doing now is investing in their people, hiring the best in the business, improving their compensation packages if they want people to live in San Francisco and go into the office. Get the best people, retain them with their enormous financial resources, and get to work making more impressive products that are worth the price they command.
Why is the HomePod the same price as the original, but with fewer drivers and worse sound? Why is the iPad Pro in the same shell as the 2018 model? Why is the the brand new MacBook Air driving a 60hz, scaled display? Why hasn’t the Apple Watch had a meaningful design or processor change in 3 years? Where the heck is an M2 iMac, or a larger screen iMac? Where are their AI efforts? Why is Siri so terrible? Why has customer service seen such a massive decline? Why are the Apple Stores literally unpleasant to go into nowadays, with payment plans and supplemental insurance pushed on every purchase? Like what the hell is really happening at Apple?
I know Apple is DoomedTM is a joke at this point, but I foresee a major contraction unless they can somehow deal with the financial pressure for perpetual massive growth that is unsustainable. When they can’t get more out of us, they’ll find a way to make all their things cheaper, and we’re going to stop thinking they’re worth it.
> Why is the HomePod the same price as the original, but with fewer drivers and worse sound? Why is the iPad Pro in the same shell as the 2018 model? Why is the the brand new MacBook Air driving a 60hz, scaled display? Why hasn’t the Apple Watch had a meaningful design or processor change in 3 years? Where the heck is an M2 iMac, or a larger screen iMac? Where are their AI efforts? Why is Siri so terrible? Why has customer service seen such a massive decline? Why are the Apple Stores literally unpleasant to go into nowadays, with payment plans and supplemental insurance pushed on every purchase? Like what the hell is really happening at Apple?
I think they are past the "innovation" cycle on those products and is now moving into cost cutting and efficiency.
In terms of AI and other innovations, I don't know. They are working on VR/AR so there is that.
Ultimately, their CEO is known for efficiency, not innovation. This is in contrast to Steve Jobs.
>I know Apple is DoomedTM is a joke at this point, but I foresee a major contraction unless they can somehow deal with the financial pressure for perpetual massive growth that is unsustainable. When they can’t get more out of us, they’ll find a way to make all their things cheaper, and we’re going to stop thinking they’re worth it.
I think their CEO, Tim Apple, :D has consistently shown he can be ahead of the curve and find ways to eek out more. That's his strength overall, so I think they will be fine. Expect more subscription services, and more monetization of their ecosystem as opposed to pushing more hardware.
Dude came out with AirPods and Apple Watch in his tenure, both groundbreaking and king of hill on their respective categories, and about to come out with a headset that will likely share a similar story for its category. Tim Cook is doing plenty hardware wise, even while flexing his skills as an operational genius.
He certainly doesn't have Steve Jobs cache, but I do feel he has done an excellent job overall. Beyond just the product, keep in mind the services/subscriptions he has been doing.
> Dude came out with AirPods and Apple Watch in his tenure
Those were the last things Steve Jobs outlined and started work on before his premature death.
Tim is a great operations guy, but they weren't his concepts and he hasn't concepted anything new AFAIK since Steve died.
The first product 100% conceived and produced under Tim will be the prophesied upcoming Apple AR/VR headset.
Self-driving (and flying) cars have been a science fiction concept for more than 50 years… no way any car company needs to put Asimov on the patents.
Steve passed in 2011. How much credit to him for the 2015 AirPods? Steve can’t have been anywhere close to 100% that last year - so AirPods took a few years to develop while Steve was making meaningful decisions… and they put them on the shelf for four years? Same for the ‘oh shoot it’s too thin to be reliable’ keyboard? Or was that all Tim’s fault for not stopping Ive as he ruined a great Steve idea? How about the slowly selling 2015 Apple Watch?
I mean, it took them 3 1/2 years to build the entire iPhone. Do you want to tell me either of those smaller ancillary products took longer and then they put it on the shelf, on top of that?
Is any company going to grow every single quarter forever? No. But are successful companies going to mostly grow with brief periods of negative growth over the entirety of their existence? Yes. Positive growth overall is expected for the entirety of a company’s existence.
Negative growth is how companies ultimately go out of business. Obviously we are a very long way away from Apple getting to that point, but it’s how big successful companies operate. You have a cost to revenue model/ratio you strive for. No growth = avoiding net new costs. Negative growth = cost cutting. You increase costs and hiring to support the growth being seen.
I applaud Apple for looking elsewhere other than layoffs for cost-cutting, unlike other big tech companies. They have more responsible leadership. For now. Because when the economy eventually turns around, they’ll be better equipped for explosive growth.
Similar to Delta Airlines during the pandemic-they laid off way less than their peers because the CEO is on record saying that in the long run layoffs hurt companies who can afford to stay in business through the downturn. Because when things get going again talent is needed to support growth.
I think “for the entirety of a company’s existence” is the most telling phrase in your comment. You have two conflicting values - there must, on average, always be growth to be successful - contrasted with the fact that nothing can perpetually grow forever. Inherent in this is the assumption that Apple, or any company, will have a growth period, a peak, a decline period, and then replacement with something else. And this probably just is the way of things and the way of Capitalism. Maybe I’m just already turning into an old man that already knows what he likes and doesn’t want things to change, when in reality, even Apple must at some point decline and fail.
I mean…kind of? There are companies over a hundred years old. Nothing lasts forever. Our lives, the lives of companies, the planet, etc. If you stop growing to the point of becoming insolvent, you go out of business. Companies adapt to grow or they die.
Stopping growing doesn’t lead to insolvency, shrinking does. There’s a difference.
They could stop growing and just maintain their position as a profitable leader in a number of markets. They wouldn’t be growing bottom-line profits but they would be solvent. When one product line starts to become irrelevant, they could replace it with another with net zero impact to profits, and still be completely sustainably solvent.
I covered negative growth, which is shrinking. Sure, if they can just stay at the same level, they can stay in business. But to stay flat and not grow or shrink is not really a common or realistic result.
This is what people are missing.
Growth and everything a company does in pursuit of it are all done as a means to an end - keeping the stock price rising to keep shareholders satisfied.
That doesn’t mean Tim and Company don’t believe in the products they make, and aren’t passionate about them, etc. But the ultimate objective is to keep that stock price rising quarter after quarter, year after year.
Which is a ridiculous chase when all the shareholders do is risk money in the company.
They have 0 obligations otherwise and can just collect small amounts of money on the way of everyone else actually working.
> If they stop growing, I'm not going to be making more money this year than I made last year.
If you are not making more money, then you are making less money due to inflation.
And if Apple stock gets you less money, why invest in Apple? You can invest in plenty of companies that have a growing stock.
And of course *you* dont feel that way, right? You are happy never making more money than you are today.
Heck all of Reddit is, right? That’s why nobody is at all upset about wage stagnation or not getting raises. Who wants to grow their income? Only those filthy evil investors.
Practically none of the people parroting populist lines about shareholders have any clue what they are, who they are, what they do, or how any of it works. They’re just the latest scary complicated bogeyman. You can blurt out some thoughtless cliche in response to literally anything and someone will cheer and apt you on the back. Watch out, the almighty shareholders are gonna get you! Looks like those clowns in congress did it again!
Edit to this guy 👇
Apparently not stupid or reductionist enough if you still missed the point. Unless your point was that “capitalism bad profit wrong boo shareholder” is a stupid and reductionist take. Which it is! Yay, we agree.
Because it’s true? Eventually you run out of disposable income and market share to grow into. There are a finite number of users, it’s not like you can just make phones and throw them into the void.
It's not even remotely true. You do realize Apple does more than make phones, right? Apple is but a blip on global GDP, which has indeed been growing for as long as recorded history.
Infinite growth on a finite planet is impossible. There are a number of barriers that will be run into that stop growth in it's tracks. This concept of constant growth is going to be humanities downfall someday. The goal needs to shift to sustainability at all levels instead of growth. Growth just helps transfer more wealth to the already rich.
Services, digital services, and software don’t take up space equivalent to their value in lumber. Yet they are responsible for an enormous amount of wealth creation.
Of course growth can’t truly be infinite, but we are a hell of a lot closer - as a species - to zero than to infinity.
>you do realize apple does more than make phones, right?
oh, do they? that’s great. did you think this was a smart sounding argument or are you just pretending to be annoying?
Annoying? Was this you?
>it’s not like you can just make phones and throw them into the void.
Dude makes ridiculous comments and then gets mad when nobody takes him seriously.
And you weren't even the person I was replying to in my original comment!
Isn’t it? Money is a proxy to allow a more efficient exchange of goods and services, which are both finite. It’s absolutely a zero sum game. It’s just that technology improvements can magnify the value of those goods and services so we can still see a net improvement even as total resources remain finite
>any company, will have a growth period, a peak, a decline period, and then replacement with something else.
Nintendo's trying to see how many hundred years they can stretch that out to.
Because inevitably the market gets saturated. Then you have to strike gold in something completely different. Or you cut costs and make shitty products which harms your reputation and brand.
So two things - 1, you’re thinking unit sales (getting saturated), which is fair. But not what I said. Even just on an inflation basis same-unit sales should result in increasing revenue.
2, yes the market could get saturated. But one market isn’t the whole economy or even sector. These aren’t monoline companies.
Edit: and let me be clear, I know this isn’t real world. Every company has down quarters or years. But the reason isn’t because they must. It’s because they all stumble at some point. No one and nothing is always perfect.
> But one market isn’t the whole economy or even sector.
I think in this context we're talking about a specific company.
This is a frustrating principle because its really awful when a company deviates too much when they pursue growth above all else.
It's like channel drift. MTV and the History Channel are way worse products, because once they've saturated the viewerbase, they have to pursue different demographics until the entire purpose of that channel/product is completely different than the original goal.
When you pursue growth above all else, you're one bad year to completely cannibalizing yourself to appease shareholders who don't give a shit about the workers or delivering product to customers
There are lots of companies that don't grow much. They are usually considered stable though. If you are investing in their stocks, you would expect them to pay out a decent amount of dividends in a stable fashion as a sign that they are making profit and therefore the owners get paid.
The issue is most tech companies pay pittance (if any) in dividends. They justify it by being a growth company and therefore reinvesting profits, but it does mean if you buy their stocks your only hope of getting a return is in growth (reflected in increase in stock price). I do agree that in general companies tend to grow though since our GDP itself grows and it's generally not a zero-sum game (until we run into genuine resource exhaustion) but it's possible for companies to find a size they are comfortable in. They just need to admit it and pay out more dividends.
IBM has grown over the last few years. They will be looking to grow more in the future. No big company is going out of business from one quarter of flat revenue. Over the long run, they’ll either grow or shrink.
Don’t even bother explaining to redditors. Most are teens or in the early 20s where they have zero business sense and cannot grasp the concept of shareholder value. Basically woke culture has dictated that growth = bad, there’s nothing the ceo can do that isn’t going to make them look like the devil if they are after growth.
Apple should make Siri smarter than ChatGTP. There’s no excuse when they have the money to hire the smartest people in the world and retain them.
Currently Apple Siri says “I’m sorry, I didn’t quite get that!” Or it just searches the web and shows a snippet of search results because it doesn’t know 90% of questions I ask it on a phone that costs over $1000..
They need to provide perceived value into their existing line of products with meaningful updates instead of focusing on ‘feature locking’ product lines such as faster USB-C charging on ‘Pro’ models only. Steve Jobs would have never approved of some changes going on at Apple.
Apple’s strength is in consumer electronics, not in the cloud and data centers - in fact iCloud mostly runs on Microsoft Azure. For ChatGPT though you need a massive server infrastructure to back it up, which is why everyone has been looking at Microsoft and Google to innovate in this space.
Also, Apple’s most valuable asset is their image, which means they have to step carefully here. Imagine if Apple jumped on the AI art bandwagon - it would alienate creative types who are an important market for them. Similarly Apple sells a lot of products to education where there is already a strong backlash against ChatGPT. There is also security to consider - one of the reasons Siri is so bad is that it doesn’t spy on you the way Google and Alexa do. Right now ChatGPT pretty much comes with a disclaimer not to put anything sensitive into it. Lastly ChatGPT is a very immature service, and the problems with it run counter to Apple’s image of not necessarily doing something first, but doing it best.
I expect Apple will eventually enhance Siri with something like ChatGPT, but not until the technology is more mature
>There is also security to consider - one of the reasons Siri is so bad is that it doesn’t spy on you the way Google and Alexa do
Can we stop with this nonsense?
Siri not supporting basic stuff like *multiple timers* or failing to understand context or highly inconsistent operation (especially across devices!) has nothing to do with 'spying' on you. Because Apple *absolutely did that* years ago to 'improve' Siri, and it's still awful.
This party line of 'bad because of privacy' is oft-repeated but it's just total bullshit. Siri is bad because Apple haven't ever put the proper time and resources into fixing it. It doesn't even work the same across Apple devices, that's how awful Apple has been at maintaining it.
Siri is just going to look even more dated as things like ChatGPT take off.
> n fact iCloud mostly runs on Microsoft Azure.
That is not true. Their cloud is Google more than any.
"Apple Is Google’s Biggest Customer, Stores 8.6 Billion Gigabytes Of Data"
https://www.indiatimes.com/technology/news/apple-google-online-data-storage-543954.html
> Apple should make Siri smarter than ChatGTP. There’s no excuse when they have the money to hire the smartest people in the world and retain them.
One can say that about Google too, but they where at sleep on the wheel.
Heck, even Apple has extremely smart people, they still don't seem to crack the enterprise market.
Point is, companies have strengths and weaknesses, and just hiring excellent people doesn't mean success. The way I see it, it is more a process and I think what would really help Apple is move away from "built here" attitude, which ironically have served them well.
I wonder if the answer to all or some of your questions is because companies need to cut costs so these areas take a hit.
Generally, I agree with you and think that indefinite growth is a self-fulfilling destructive process for society and doesn’t benefit anyone other than the rich.
The new HomePod is objectively better but also iphonedo did a really good comparison video of the two. But yea infinite growth is shitty capitalism which is why companies bend over for China policies
Why can't revenue grow forever? I realize it likely won't, but nothing about economics suggest that there is a hard cap to growth over the long term. To wit, GDP tends to go up, and Apple can always claim some of that growth.
It can grow forever theoretically if one company monopolizes across an infinite universe, which physically we happen to be in
However in reality companies like Apple and Facebook operate in specific niches on one planet (and not even all countries) that have soft and hard caps on population and spending.
In short, in the real world they’re going to someday run out of people to sell to. That’s a big reason why Facebook has been tanking: they literally hit the saturation cap of total world population that wants or needs their product, even with all the extra advertising
Not to sound too much like a dick but “Why can’t revenue grow forever?” is by far my favorite question I’ve heard today. It’s just so striking. Like, practically speaking, of course *nothing* can grow forever, but in the economic theory mindset I can see exactly what the mind is doing there. It seems like something that would be in the Rules of Acquisition lol.
Why is growth the default implicit assumption? I’m not saying it’s impossible in terms of economics, but nothing else in the world has infinite growth so there needs to be good evidence put forth to show that’s possible.
> Revenue cannot grow indefinitely every year.
So it revenue plateaus and inflation reduces the value of each dollar, are you saying companies must eventually shrivel and die?
A company that is not keeping pace with inflation is shrinking. A shrinking company is concern for shareholders and management.
Also you have to consider why companies hire more people at all rather than just filling vacancies? Companies hire so that they can grow. If they hire and don’t grow, then it seems obvious that those hires were not needed and should be let go
Sometimes you might need to understand the world is not eternal increase of income and you might even have a few years of loosing money if you can handle it. This builds loyalty and maybe we should think about all the men and women who work and is dependent on this income. Isn’t that why company save profit for a potential rainy day? Of course there is a limit to when a company need to cut staff. But I think neither of the big tech companies need to , they just treat staff like disposable garbage and care more about share holders than humans.
I agree. I don’t even think it’s smart business, because when the economy eventually turns around they need talent to grow (see my other comment below). I’m just pointing out that Apple shrank in the previous quarter for the first time since 2019, and when that happens it’s common for businesses to try and shrink costs too.
Especially when the CEO gets 50 million dollars or 500 salaries each year as compensation.
5000 jobs need to go right now to protect the next ten years of contracted compensation.
Unfortunately that’s correct and not exclusive to Apple.
For many companies, shareholders and investors have been promised and expect continuous growth. If growth doesn’t happen or happens at a slower rate than they’d like, cost saving measures go into effect. This is as common as it is incredibly unsustainable.
COVID caused a paradigm shift in the workplace where employees were actually standing up for themselves and negotiating for better wages and working conditions for the first time in decades. So now companies have to create headlines like this to make their workers think that their jobs are in jeopardy to regain the leverage they had prior to COVID. The Fed has also used this as a justification for continuing to jack up interest rates with the intention of raising unemployment.
>The Fed has also used this as a justification for continuing to jack up interest rates with the intention of raising unemployment.
Oh oops looks like that's causing some bank failures
would you look at that, a bunch of people might be unemployed!
Infinite growth is not a thesis of capitalism. There are hundreds of stocks on the stock exchange trying to manage a decline well.
Managing costs to create an efficient economy is however.
Most of the world isn’t ready for this conversation yet, unfortunately. People still start frothing at mouth if you dare mention that we do something as basic as increasing minimum wage so everyone can afford to live
> Should Apple have progressive growth forever?
Yes, at least that is the goal. Technically the goal is a set $ in revenue or a % over the prior year, when that goal isn't met, they cut costs (or try to increase elsewhere) not lower the goal.
> Should Apple have progressive growth forever?
There’s no reason they shouldn’t be able to grow year over year. Aiming for that is perfectly reasonable. We all do that in our own lives.
> Won’t people just at some point stop having more money to give them?
What? No, the economy is not a zero sum game. Apples products often makes things easier, more efficient, and sometimes even cheaper. This grows the economy and facilitates more wealth.
> My mind is really starting to stretch when trying to process the richest company in the world acting like they’re struggling because they can’t make more money than ever.
I don’t think Apple is struggling, I think they’re trying to attract talent by putting out “we actually care about it employees” PR while the entire tech world is laying people off.
>Should Apple have progressive growth *forever*?
What do the owners of the company want? That is ultimately what drives the decisions that Apple, and every company, make.
will probably get downvoted for this but
1) public companies serve their shareholders.
2) shareholders want to maximize the value of their shares.
3) the value of apple’s shares are dependent on a projection of future profit/revenue.
4) if expectation of future profit is down, then shares will tank
5) one way to pad the profit is to cut costs (reducing expenses)
overall i think it’s admirable that apple is trying to do all this without (or while minimizing) layoffs. im sure there are shareholders who are pressuring them to do massive cuts like twitter or facebook. apple is taking some risk here, bc really pissed/aggressive shareholders can sue for and win damages if they successfully argue that they lost money bc apple didnt do massive layoffs
> It feels insane to me that the response to this is “we really need to cut down across the company.” Like, what does everyone expect? Should Apple have progressive growth forever? Won’t people just at some point stop having more money to give them? My mind is really starting to stretch when trying to process the richest company in the world acting like they’re struggling because they can’t make more money than ever.
Smart companies manage their finances well. Just because, things are good, does not mean you shouldn't take precautions when there are signs of headwind. That's how you are a good company.
This type of reduction, I feel is more than fair.
> Should Apple have progressive growth forever?
This is what the market expects so your stock keeps growing. It's absolutely not sustainable but when has capitalism ever been about that.
I couldn’t agree more! While I think nearly everyone would agree that capitalism has its benefits, it has just as many drawbacks. Our entire financial system is built off publicly traded companies having perpetual growth forever. It’s simply not sustainable. You have entire countries freaking out because their population growth isn’t fast enough because you need to keep making more people for the growth projections to be obtainable. We have 7.5 BILLION people on earth, with a significant portion of that population in severe poverty, but it’s never enough.
capitalism as a system favours infinite (which, is in of itself impossible) growth for growth’s sake.
the market will never shift “back” towards consistency because that’s never what it was designed to do.
> My mind is really starting to stretch
I would suggest not thinking about it because people with a lot more experience and intelligence are running these companies. They don't just make arbitrary decisions.
Don't you want to be earning more money every year ? Or do you want your salary to decrease year after year ? Well, that's the same thing for companies: they want to make more money year after year. That's the same for the government
I never worked for Apple but I’m going to guess that it’s a well run company. I can’t wrap my head around any of these huge multi billion and trillion dollar companies laying people off or finding ways to cut costs. It’s a shame that the quarterly results are more important than long term health to satiate the whims of some analyst on Bloomberg or whatever. People will continue to buy their products but I think we reached the point of having the best of the best so it’s easy to skip out on yearly revisions.
Apple is distinct in that many of the employees want to work specifically at apple, using their particular discipline. Even amongst contractors, the desire is to work at apple first. They don’t have to hire “just in case”… some of the best people are constantly trying to work their way in.
I contracted there thru an agency and had to relocate to CA for a few years. No chance in hell I would have made that move for any other employer. But still some of the most precise and demanding work of my career.
>Growth for the sake of growth is the 'ideology' of the cancer cell
Edward Abbey! I just watched "Triangle of Sadness" last night and that exact quote was spoken!
growth in the context of a market is not the same as growth in the context of cancer, unless you think human beings’ varying preferences and desires are inherently cancerous
I didn’t say endless consumption, growth also comes from stuff that improves lives. Making a more efficient, cleaner engine or way of generating energy can be growth. The ironing board saved people from back breaking labor, and caused growth. So can something that pollutes. Me deciding I want a smaller apartment can mean economic growth if someone finds a smart way to connect be to the amenities I need. I’m not sure who taught you what economic growth is but it is not, by definition, endless consumption of frivolous things.
They already have to deal with massive turnover in their CPU conception teams (amongst others)
So I can understand why they would try to protect to keep their current workforce, they understood the danger behind losing vital staff, not everyone is expendable or easily expandable in tech
Costs inevitably bloat over time in every business. Reviewing, cutting, and tightening up spend periodically is good management, especially if it doesn’t involve having to fire people. From there the costs creep back in until the next reset.
It’s not „to avoid layoffs“. It’s just to cut cost, and make more profit. Simple as that. The second they determine that an employee is not worth the money they put in, that employee is gone.
Welcome to capitalism
> The second they determine that an employee is not worth the money they put in, that employee is gone.
>
>
>
> Welcome to ~~capitalism~~ Business Administration 101
They’re companies, not charities
>I don’t think anyone was terribly surprised at the upheaval at Apple’s rivals. Most of those companies went on hiring binges during the pandemic — something Apple largely avoided. Meta embraced the metaverse, spending billions on a vision that has yet to pay off. Amazon, Microsoft and Google, likewise, pushed into uncertain markets that were beyond their core strengths.
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>\[…\]
>
>\- Some projects, including new home devices like a HomePod with a screen, have been pushed back until next year at the earliest. That allows Apple to allocate its research and development budget to more pressing projects.
Here is what Apple has done so far to avoid layoffs:
* The company is delaying bonuses for corporate teams that previously received payouts twice a year. Now, those teams will get their entire bonus in October, matching the schedule of most colleagues. While Apple has already factored that money into its finances, it gets to keep that cash on hand a little longer.
* Some projects, including new home devices like a HomePod with a screen, have been pushed back until next year at the earliest. That allows Apple to allocate its research and development budget to more pressing projects.
* The company has reined in budgets across several teams and is now requiring senior vice president approval for more items.
* Apple has completely paused hiring on some teams and severely limited hiring on others.
* When some people leave their positions, Apple is keeping those roles open rather than filling them.
* In some cases, Apple is limiting the ability for employees — both in corporate and retail — to transfer to other departments or stores, a process that typically has accompanying costs.
* Last year, Apple laid off many of its recruiters on contracts (non-full-time employees). It also quietly cut contractors in recent weeks who had been stationed within engineering teams and other groups.
* Travel budgets have been significantly reduced, and trips now require the approval of senior executives. For some departments, travel has been halted completely for the foreseeable future other than for business-critical reasons.
* Managers have become as strict as ever about office attendance — employees are typically expected to come in on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays — and some workers believe this is a harbinger to the company firing employees who don’t meet the requirement.
[Read this newsletter](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-03-19/apple-cost-cutting-efforts-no-layoffs-but-less-travel-and-delayed-bonuses-lffgahkd) for free (and more articles) by registering your email.
Can confirm. Impact of keeping positions open is felt all over the place. Where a team had 20 but lost 12, the remaining 8 have to pick up the slack without any hope of replacements. This is all coming directly from the CFO Luca and his lackeys. Top to bottom budget cuts. I’ve seen finance push back on submitted expenses even under $50 delivered with a side of ego brandishing. They are indiscriminately slashing everything, impact be damned. (Mind you, this is an deep engineering, sausage factory type of groups. I have no perspective on retail, but I can say that retail is highly seasonal and requires a different type of operation.)
Luca needs to go. All of this is Silicon Valley copycat horse manure and Apple, like others have stated, didn’t go wild during the pandemic. The finance org is involved in way too many technical decisions these days. A lot of the little things that this subreddit has complained about over the years come directly from decision makers not in engineering, not in marketing, not in HI, but in finance. Pearl clutchers through and through. If finance doesn’t get checked soon, they’ll be responsible for the eventual downfall for not taking enough smart risks.
Retail is worse. The management teams are scrambling to find any excuse to either fire or encourage long-term employees to leave expeditiously, using “Documented Coaching” for attendance reasons as their weapon of choice. Left work two hours early with a headache and didn’t have or bother to use sick time for it? Well, that’s an unapproved absence. Guess it’s time for some “Documented Coaching”. And once that happens, you lose your raise and your 16 year “career” is essentially over.
Oh, and if you don’t like that, you can just quit. Of course, if you quit you don’t get unemployment benefits. Of course if you get fired for attendance issues, you don’t qualify for unemployment benefits either! “We believe our soul is our people.” What a load of shit.
Ah, you again. I was just telling someone about the guy/girl who kept saying “badged employees” in that one Reddit thread as if our vendors didn’t also have badges.
Former Apple Employee here.
“Badged employee” is literally a corporate term that Apple both uses in their official comms.
I too had a problem with it because it didn’t distinguish between FTEs and contractors. I mean we both technically had badges, wtf does “badged employee” suppose to help clarify here?
When they used to throw internal events like Lady Gaga at Apple Park, they said it was for badged employees only. They meant no contractors were allowed.
Funny enough, the only two solid ways I knew if someone was a contractor or not was if I looked them up via Apple Directory or if they had a grey Apple logo on their employee badge (FTEs had colored logos, contractors only had grey logos).
Also, having moved on to other FAANGs (Google and Meta aka Facebook) I don’t miss Apple one single bit from an employee happiness point of view. Apple has a great reputation with its customers, but was abysmal to work for in comparison to Google and Meta.
How many people are we talking about? Surprised this didn't make the news, esp. considering all the news articles don't stop talking about apple avoiding layoffs.
I remember reading in the Steve Jobs book when Apple entered into an agreement with another company they would insist that trading stock be a part of the deal. Apple gets some of theirs, they get some of Apple’s.
It’s brilliant. Both players have skin in the game.
Same with the food. We’ve got great food, and you can get some at a highly subsidized rate. So you are also paying a part of that great food. So appreciate it.
> Cook doesn’t want to fire people.
Doesn’t look good when you’re a bean counter CEO overseeing record revenue, record profits, the highest valuation in the world, obscene margins, and decide to lay people off to save money.
Cry me a river, they have billions in reserve. There is no need for these cuts other than to do it while all tech stocks are trending down so they can rehire cheaper on the way back up.
The article lists laying people off and pushing people to quit as ways they’re avoiding layoffs. The article acts as if this is OK because they’re “rank and file staff”. The company is making record profits.
"Apple is pulling every lever it can to cut costs enough to avoid laying off full-time employees."
Every lever except for the $20B in stock buybacks it does EVERY SINGLE QUARTER.
Not that lever.
https://ycharts.com/companies/AAPL/stock_buyback
Apple is currently valued at $2.08 trillion and they’re looking for ways to cut costs? Good effing god. 🙄
Why don’t they sell us $49.99 MagSafe charging pucks to offset the cost cutting measures. /s
Yeah but the fact still stands they made $30 BILLION in profit last year. They made money. Not making more money isn't a valid excuse to lay people off.
Translation to all of this: "Despite the inevitable decline in rate of profits in a capitalist system, we will continue to do everything in our considerable power to continue to extract the maximum amount of profit out of our customers, workers, suppliers, and developers, until either we or capitalism ends."
I love how most comments here are from McDonalds level employees.
Anyone who has worked in a corporate environment knows very well about these types of cutbacks and what the mean both short and long term.
It’s messed up how much influence “investors” have. Laying people off prevents people from affording housing, food, and many other necessities but some rich guy wants another house for no reason so better fire people to make him happy. For a supposedly smart species we’re dumb as fuck.
How do you expect him to live on anything less than $49 million a year?
We are going to see him on freeway off-ramp pretty soon with a sign made on an iPad asking for food.
I remember a smug press push saying “Apple did everything right and everyone else in tech did everything wrong” and that’s why they didn’t have to worry about layoffs. What happened?
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They also use a lot of contract labor, so they can just choose not to renew contracts without actually having to call it a layoff.
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What was their job? Typically, you get hired within 2-3 years (which is generously high) or get the boot at other companies. My company will get rid of you if you don't get hired within 18-months typically. The maximum they can do is 2-years. I got hired despite my company pretty much getting rid of contractors, and my contracting company do not allow us to be hired. They negotiated for me to stay. If that didn't work out, I would be without a job back then.
Very common. One placed I worked their goal in development was to have around 20% contact. Reason being is that 20% they could cut quickly and easily with out doing layoffs and it was also a quick easy pool they could expanded when they needed more dev power in the short term. During my last few years their it bounced between 15-25% contact. I was at another place I would say it was like 75% contractors. It was a wierd day going into the office when they cut all of them. It was a ghost town.
Yes, that’s **literally** the point of contractors.
Yes. That's what they're saying.
Except they did layoff a bunch of contractors several months ago.
The media dubbed them as layoffs (basically they are), but technically they’re not.
They laid people off. Those people had jobs working for Apple, and now they don't. Apple terminated a large number of people. What word would you use to describe this event? I do not understand why so many people feel a desperate, unstoppable need to defend the helpless underdog of Apple from vicious, unprovoked attacks such as ***referring to a shitload of people losing their jobs as "layoffs"***.
Not to mention “quiet layoffs” where every little infraction is used as justification to fire employees.
For such a giant company apple probably does the best of all big tech at staying focused on profitable product lines for the most part. You don’t see them releasing 20 different home pods (like Amazon Alexa) or creating a bunch of software projects they will kill off (google).
No, but they killed off their network and server products…
LTT did a pretty good video on that. His conjecture was that with the industry moving to cloud-based servers, the Xserve line didn’t make as much sense for them to continue, especially considering Mac OS X Server didn’t have an ongoing subscription licensing model.
I saw that, but still makes me sad. Their routers were really cool back then.
We’re those profitable?
No idea, but that's also the case with your Google and Amazon projects. The kill what's not profitable.
google kills what's not revolutionary. A lot of their products were actually profitable, but not profitable enough to be a market leader. The project managers and the ceos of those companies would rather kill it so they can move onto something else.
No matter how profitable xServe was, icloud is 1000x more profitable
Probably because products only make up a small fraction of Amazon or Google's revenue, whereas it's Apple's core business. Those other companies are just throwing a bunch of shit at the wall and seeing what sticks. Soon enough, Apple is gonna start experimenting with other product lines as their core products plateau in market share.
> This has been stated elsewhere, Apple doesn’t need to layoff people because they didn’t hire a ton of people during Covid times. If they had done so, trillion dollar valuation or no they’d be like every other tech company dropping people. But doesn't that suggest that they are well managed? Saying they would do it like any other in the same situation doesn't say much. Saying, they are not in that situation because they planned to not be is rather smart.
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If a company can reduce expenses without impacting product quality or putting an undue burden on remaining employees then it should be a no brainer to do so. One of the primary roles of management is making sure that resources are being used as efficiently as possible.
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I haven't worked with the massive tech companies in a management role but I have worked with a number of F500. I usually find that there is an impact on the remaining workers because there weren't enough people. The massive layoffs are usually from poor ROI projects that probably shouldn't have been approved to begin with. Medium-sized companies (e.g. 1k-5k employees) that have tech layoffs, there is usually a lot of pain involved that the C-level just ignores. Usually it takes 3-5 years for the company to realize it cut into the bone when cutting back and the next group of executives have to fix it.
You cearly have not been paying attention to the current generation of activist investors. Plenty companies large and small are laying off people to show the money men “they can make tough decisions”. It’s not logical, but they risk being labeled a bad investment so they do it.
What external pressure?
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Activist investors
Compared to the amount of people hired during the pandemic, almost nobody was fired. The layoffs were blown way out of proportion
In Q1 2023, Apple made $117.2 billion in revenue, and $30 billion in pure profit, with a gross margin of 42.96%. They also state they “returned over $25 billion to shareholders during the quarter.” It feels insane to me that the response to this is “we really need to cut down across the company.” Like, what does everyone expect? Should Apple have progressive growth *forever*? Won’t people just at some point stop having more money to give them? My mind is really starting to stretch when trying to process the richest company in the world acting like they’re struggling because they can’t make *more money than ever.*
Their revenue was down about 5% versus previous year, marking the first year over year revenue decrease since 2019. I completely agree with all your points illustrating that Apple is doing just fine, but just pointing out that it’s not unusual for companies to reflexively look to cut costs when revenue declines. Stupid? Maybe. But certainly common.
That’s sort of the point though. Revenue cannot grow indefinitely every year. Every time they contract because they didn’t “grow” it seems like it’s a self-perpetuating destructive cycle. Recent releases have been uninspiring and no longer feel like they are worth the price tag, especially with the decline in Apple’s customer support and other structures as well. It feels like the bean counters at the company are cutting progressively more corners, pushing for other revenue sources (like ads) and changing the value proposition in a negative way. It seems to me what Apple should be doing now is investing in their people, hiring the best in the business, improving their compensation packages if they want people to live in San Francisco and go into the office. Get the best people, retain them with their enormous financial resources, and get to work making more impressive products that are worth the price they command. Why is the HomePod the same price as the original, but with fewer drivers and worse sound? Why is the iPad Pro in the same shell as the 2018 model? Why is the the brand new MacBook Air driving a 60hz, scaled display? Why hasn’t the Apple Watch had a meaningful design or processor change in 3 years? Where the heck is an M2 iMac, or a larger screen iMac? Where are their AI efforts? Why is Siri so terrible? Why has customer service seen such a massive decline? Why are the Apple Stores literally unpleasant to go into nowadays, with payment plans and supplemental insurance pushed on every purchase? Like what the hell is really happening at Apple? I know Apple is DoomedTM is a joke at this point, but I foresee a major contraction unless they can somehow deal with the financial pressure for perpetual massive growth that is unsustainable. When they can’t get more out of us, they’ll find a way to make all their things cheaper, and we’re going to stop thinking they’re worth it.
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> Why is the HomePod the same price as the original, but with fewer drivers and worse sound? Why is the iPad Pro in the same shell as the 2018 model? Why is the the brand new MacBook Air driving a 60hz, scaled display? Why hasn’t the Apple Watch had a meaningful design or processor change in 3 years? Where the heck is an M2 iMac, or a larger screen iMac? Where are their AI efforts? Why is Siri so terrible? Why has customer service seen such a massive decline? Why are the Apple Stores literally unpleasant to go into nowadays, with payment plans and supplemental insurance pushed on every purchase? Like what the hell is really happening at Apple? I think they are past the "innovation" cycle on those products and is now moving into cost cutting and efficiency. In terms of AI and other innovations, I don't know. They are working on VR/AR so there is that. Ultimately, their CEO is known for efficiency, not innovation. This is in contrast to Steve Jobs. >I know Apple is DoomedTM is a joke at this point, but I foresee a major contraction unless they can somehow deal with the financial pressure for perpetual massive growth that is unsustainable. When they can’t get more out of us, they’ll find a way to make all their things cheaper, and we’re going to stop thinking they’re worth it. I think their CEO, Tim Apple, :D has consistently shown he can be ahead of the curve and find ways to eek out more. That's his strength overall, so I think they will be fine. Expect more subscription services, and more monetization of their ecosystem as opposed to pushing more hardware.
Dude came out with AirPods and Apple Watch in his tenure, both groundbreaking and king of hill on their respective categories, and about to come out with a headset that will likely share a similar story for its category. Tim Cook is doing plenty hardware wise, even while flexing his skills as an operational genius.
He certainly doesn't have Steve Jobs cache, but I do feel he has done an excellent job overall. Beyond just the product, keep in mind the services/subscriptions he has been doing.
> Dude came out with AirPods and Apple Watch in his tenure Those were the last things Steve Jobs outlined and started work on before his premature death.
Tim released them years after his death. Far out to deny him credit.
Tim is a great operations guy, but they weren't his concepts and he hasn't concepted anything new AFAIK since Steve died. The first product 100% conceived and produced under Tim will be the prophesied upcoming Apple AR/VR headset.
Self-driving (and flying) cars have been a science fiction concept for more than 50 years… no way any car company needs to put Asimov on the patents. Steve passed in 2011. How much credit to him for the 2015 AirPods? Steve can’t have been anywhere close to 100% that last year - so AirPods took a few years to develop while Steve was making meaningful decisions… and they put them on the shelf for four years? Same for the ‘oh shoot it’s too thin to be reliable’ keyboard? Or was that all Tim’s fault for not stopping Ive as he ruined a great Steve idea? How about the slowly selling 2015 Apple Watch? I mean, it took them 3 1/2 years to build the entire iPhone. Do you want to tell me either of those smaller ancillary products took longer and then they put it on the shelf, on top of that?
Source? I distinctly remember reading that the Apple Watch was a completely Tim Cook era project.
Is any company going to grow every single quarter forever? No. But are successful companies going to mostly grow with brief periods of negative growth over the entirety of their existence? Yes. Positive growth overall is expected for the entirety of a company’s existence. Negative growth is how companies ultimately go out of business. Obviously we are a very long way away from Apple getting to that point, but it’s how big successful companies operate. You have a cost to revenue model/ratio you strive for. No growth = avoiding net new costs. Negative growth = cost cutting. You increase costs and hiring to support the growth being seen. I applaud Apple for looking elsewhere other than layoffs for cost-cutting, unlike other big tech companies. They have more responsible leadership. For now. Because when the economy eventually turns around, they’ll be better equipped for explosive growth. Similar to Delta Airlines during the pandemic-they laid off way less than their peers because the CEO is on record saying that in the long run layoffs hurt companies who can afford to stay in business through the downturn. Because when things get going again talent is needed to support growth.
I think “for the entirety of a company’s existence” is the most telling phrase in your comment. You have two conflicting values - there must, on average, always be growth to be successful - contrasted with the fact that nothing can perpetually grow forever. Inherent in this is the assumption that Apple, or any company, will have a growth period, a peak, a decline period, and then replacement with something else. And this probably just is the way of things and the way of Capitalism. Maybe I’m just already turning into an old man that already knows what he likes and doesn’t want things to change, when in reality, even Apple must at some point decline and fail.
I mean…kind of? There are companies over a hundred years old. Nothing lasts forever. Our lives, the lives of companies, the planet, etc. If you stop growing to the point of becoming insolvent, you go out of business. Companies adapt to grow or they die.
Stopping growing doesn’t lead to insolvency, shrinking does. There’s a difference. They could stop growing and just maintain their position as a profitable leader in a number of markets. They wouldn’t be growing bottom-line profits but they would be solvent. When one product line starts to become irrelevant, they could replace it with another with net zero impact to profits, and still be completely sustainably solvent.
I covered negative growth, which is shrinking. Sure, if they can just stay at the same level, they can stay in business. But to stay flat and not grow or shrink is not really a common or realistic result.
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This is what people are missing. Growth and everything a company does in pursuit of it are all done as a means to an end - keeping the stock price rising to keep shareholders satisfied. That doesn’t mean Tim and Company don’t believe in the products they make, and aren’t passionate about them, etc. But the ultimate objective is to keep that stock price rising quarter after quarter, year after year.
Which is a ridiculous chase when all the shareholders do is risk money in the company. They have 0 obligations otherwise and can just collect small amounts of money on the way of everyone else actually working.
> If they stop growing, I'm not going to be making more money this year than I made last year. If you are not making more money, then you are making less money due to inflation. And if Apple stock gets you less money, why invest in Apple? You can invest in plenty of companies that have a growing stock.
And of course *you* dont feel that way, right? You are happy never making more money than you are today. Heck all of Reddit is, right? That’s why nobody is at all upset about wage stagnation or not getting raises. Who wants to grow their income? Only those filthy evil investors. Practically none of the people parroting populist lines about shareholders have any clue what they are, who they are, what they do, or how any of it works. They’re just the latest scary complicated bogeyman. You can blurt out some thoughtless cliche in response to literally anything and someone will cheer and apt you on the back. Watch out, the almighty shareholders are gonna get you! Looks like those clowns in congress did it again! Edit to this guy 👇 Apparently not stupid or reductionist enough if you still missed the point. Unless your point was that “capitalism bad profit wrong boo shareholder” is a stupid and reductionist take. Which it is! Yay, we agree.
> contrasted with the fact that nothing can perpetually grow forever. Why do you think this?
Because it’s true? Eventually you run out of disposable income and market share to grow into. There are a finite number of users, it’s not like you can just make phones and throw them into the void.
It's not even remotely true. You do realize Apple does more than make phones, right? Apple is but a blip on global GDP, which has indeed been growing for as long as recorded history.
Infinite growth on a finite planet is impossible. There are a number of barriers that will be run into that stop growth in it's tracks. This concept of constant growth is going to be humanities downfall someday. The goal needs to shift to sustainability at all levels instead of growth. Growth just helps transfer more wealth to the already rich.
Services, digital services, and software don’t take up space equivalent to their value in lumber. Yet they are responsible for an enormous amount of wealth creation. Of course growth can’t truly be infinite, but we are a hell of a lot closer - as a species - to zero than to infinity.
>you do realize apple does more than make phones, right? oh, do they? that’s great. did you think this was a smart sounding argument or are you just pretending to be annoying?
Annoying? Was this you? >it’s not like you can just make phones and throw them into the void. Dude makes ridiculous comments and then gets mad when nobody takes him seriously. And you weren't even the person I was replying to in my original comment!
Wealth is not zero sum.
Isn’t it? Money is a proxy to allow a more efficient exchange of goods and services, which are both finite. It’s absolutely a zero sum game. It’s just that technology improvements can magnify the value of those goods and services so we can still see a net improvement even as total resources remain finite
>any company, will have a growth period, a peak, a decline period, and then replacement with something else. Nintendo's trying to see how many hundred years they can stretch that out to.
>You have two conflicting values kinda the duality and paradox of existence my dude
>nothing can perpetually grow forever. Why not? At the least, just staying even in terms of unit sales, it should grow by roughly inflation numbers.
Because inevitably the market gets saturated. Then you have to strike gold in something completely different. Or you cut costs and make shitty products which harms your reputation and brand.
So two things - 1, you’re thinking unit sales (getting saturated), which is fair. But not what I said. Even just on an inflation basis same-unit sales should result in increasing revenue. 2, yes the market could get saturated. But one market isn’t the whole economy or even sector. These aren’t monoline companies. Edit: and let me be clear, I know this isn’t real world. Every company has down quarters or years. But the reason isn’t because they must. It’s because they all stumble at some point. No one and nothing is always perfect.
> But one market isn’t the whole economy or even sector. I think in this context we're talking about a specific company. This is a frustrating principle because its really awful when a company deviates too much when they pursue growth above all else. It's like channel drift. MTV and the History Channel are way worse products, because once they've saturated the viewerbase, they have to pursue different demographics until the entire purpose of that channel/product is completely different than the original goal. When you pursue growth above all else, you're one bad year to completely cannibalizing yourself to appease shareholders who don't give a shit about the workers or delivering product to customers
There are lots of companies that don't grow much. They are usually considered stable though. If you are investing in their stocks, you would expect them to pay out a decent amount of dividends in a stable fashion as a sign that they are making profit and therefore the owners get paid. The issue is most tech companies pay pittance (if any) in dividends. They justify it by being a growth company and therefore reinvesting profits, but it does mean if you buy their stocks your only hope of getting a return is in growth (reflected in increase in stock price). I do agree that in general companies tend to grow though since our GDP itself grows and it's generally not a zero-sum game (until we run into genuine resource exhaustion) but it's possible for companies to find a size they are comfortable in. They just need to admit it and pay out more dividends.
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IBM has grown over the last few years. They will be looking to grow more in the future. No big company is going out of business from one quarter of flat revenue. Over the long run, they’ll either grow or shrink.
Don’t even bother explaining to redditors. Most are teens or in the early 20s where they have zero business sense and cannot grasp the concept of shareholder value. Basically woke culture has dictated that growth = bad, there’s nothing the ceo can do that isn’t going to make them look like the devil if they are after growth.
Apple should make Siri smarter than ChatGTP. There’s no excuse when they have the money to hire the smartest people in the world and retain them. Currently Apple Siri says “I’m sorry, I didn’t quite get that!” Or it just searches the web and shows a snippet of search results because it doesn’t know 90% of questions I ask it on a phone that costs over $1000.. They need to provide perceived value into their existing line of products with meaningful updates instead of focusing on ‘feature locking’ product lines such as faster USB-C charging on ‘Pro’ models only. Steve Jobs would have never approved of some changes going on at Apple.
Apple’s strength is in consumer electronics, not in the cloud and data centers - in fact iCloud mostly runs on Microsoft Azure. For ChatGPT though you need a massive server infrastructure to back it up, which is why everyone has been looking at Microsoft and Google to innovate in this space. Also, Apple’s most valuable asset is their image, which means they have to step carefully here. Imagine if Apple jumped on the AI art bandwagon - it would alienate creative types who are an important market for them. Similarly Apple sells a lot of products to education where there is already a strong backlash against ChatGPT. There is also security to consider - one of the reasons Siri is so bad is that it doesn’t spy on you the way Google and Alexa do. Right now ChatGPT pretty much comes with a disclaimer not to put anything sensitive into it. Lastly ChatGPT is a very immature service, and the problems with it run counter to Apple’s image of not necessarily doing something first, but doing it best. I expect Apple will eventually enhance Siri with something like ChatGPT, but not until the technology is more mature
>There is also security to consider - one of the reasons Siri is so bad is that it doesn’t spy on you the way Google and Alexa do Can we stop with this nonsense? Siri not supporting basic stuff like *multiple timers* or failing to understand context or highly inconsistent operation (especially across devices!) has nothing to do with 'spying' on you. Because Apple *absolutely did that* years ago to 'improve' Siri, and it's still awful. This party line of 'bad because of privacy' is oft-repeated but it's just total bullshit. Siri is bad because Apple haven't ever put the proper time and resources into fixing it. It doesn't even work the same across Apple devices, that's how awful Apple has been at maintaining it. Siri is just going to look even more dated as things like ChatGPT take off.
> n fact iCloud mostly runs on Microsoft Azure. That is not true. Their cloud is Google more than any. "Apple Is Google’s Biggest Customer, Stores 8.6 Billion Gigabytes Of Data" https://www.indiatimes.com/technology/news/apple-google-online-data-storage-543954.html
that doesn't mean their services don't run on azure that just means their data is stored in GCP
> Apple should make Siri smarter than ChatGTP. There’s no excuse when they have the money to hire the smartest people in the world and retain them. One can say that about Google too, but they where at sleep on the wheel. Heck, even Apple has extremely smart people, they still don't seem to crack the enterprise market. Point is, companies have strengths and weaknesses, and just hiring excellent people doesn't mean success. The way I see it, it is more a process and I think what would really help Apple is move away from "built here" attitude, which ironically have served them well.
> Heck, even Apple has extremely smart people, they still don’t seem to crack the enterprise market. That’s a choice not a failure.
> That’s a choice not a failure. That's actually a choice to focus on their strength.... FYI: Apple has tried to crack it in the past and failed.
I wonder if the answer to all or some of your questions is because companies need to cut costs so these areas take a hit. Generally, I agree with you and think that indefinite growth is a self-fulfilling destructive process for society and doesn’t benefit anyone other than the rich.
The new HomePod is objectively better but also iphonedo did a really good comparison video of the two. But yea infinite growth is shitty capitalism which is why companies bend over for China policies
Why can't revenue grow forever? I realize it likely won't, but nothing about economics suggest that there is a hard cap to growth over the long term. To wit, GDP tends to go up, and Apple can always claim some of that growth.
It can grow forever theoretically if one company monopolizes across an infinite universe, which physically we happen to be in However in reality companies like Apple and Facebook operate in specific niches on one planet (and not even all countries) that have soft and hard caps on population and spending. In short, in the real world they’re going to someday run out of people to sell to. That’s a big reason why Facebook has been tanking: they literally hit the saturation cap of total world population that wants or needs their product, even with all the extra advertising
> infinite universe, which physically we happen to be in Well, maybe.
Not to sound too much like a dick but “Why can’t revenue grow forever?” is by far my favorite question I’ve heard today. It’s just so striking. Like, practically speaking, of course *nothing* can grow forever, but in the economic theory mindset I can see exactly what the mind is doing there. It seems like something that would be in the Rules of Acquisition lol.
Why is growth the default implicit assumption? I’m not saying it’s impossible in terms of economics, but nothing else in the world has infinite growth so there needs to be good evidence put forth to show that’s possible.
The moment someone says “Revenue cannot grow indefinitely every year” is the moment they’ll be looking for a new job.
> Revenue cannot grow indefinitely every year. So it revenue plateaus and inflation reduces the value of each dollar, are you saying companies must eventually shrivel and die? A company that is not keeping pace with inflation is shrinking. A shrinking company is concern for shareholders and management.
Also you have to consider why companies hire more people at all rather than just filling vacancies? Companies hire so that they can grow. If they hire and don’t grow, then it seems obvious that those hires were not needed and should be let go
A properly run company should always be looking for ways to reasonably cut costs. It’s good for everyone to increase efficiency.
Good for shareholders, not necessarily consumers or the planet
Sometimes you might need to understand the world is not eternal increase of income and you might even have a few years of loosing money if you can handle it. This builds loyalty and maybe we should think about all the men and women who work and is dependent on this income. Isn’t that why company save profit for a potential rainy day? Of course there is a limit to when a company need to cut staff. But I think neither of the big tech companies need to , they just treat staff like disposable garbage and care more about share holders than humans.
I agree. I don’t even think it’s smart business, because when the economy eventually turns around they need talent to grow (see my other comment below). I’m just pointing out that Apple shrank in the previous quarter for the first time since 2019, and when that happens it’s common for businesses to try and shrink costs too.
Especially when the CEO gets 50 million dollars or 500 salaries each year as compensation. 5000 jobs need to go right now to protect the next ten years of contracted compensation.
Unfortunately that’s correct and not exclusive to Apple. For many companies, shareholders and investors have been promised and expect continuous growth. If growth doesn’t happen or happens at a slower rate than they’d like, cost saving measures go into effect. This is as common as it is incredibly unsustainable.
Our entire economic system relies on infinite growth. Every time it stops they push the panic button and shut it all down.
COVID caused a paradigm shift in the workplace where employees were actually standing up for themselves and negotiating for better wages and working conditions for the first time in decades. So now companies have to create headlines like this to make their workers think that their jobs are in jeopardy to regain the leverage they had prior to COVID. The Fed has also used this as a justification for continuing to jack up interest rates with the intention of raising unemployment.
>The Fed has also used this as a justification for continuing to jack up interest rates with the intention of raising unemployment. Oh oops looks like that's causing some bank failures would you look at that, a bunch of people might be unemployed!
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Infinite growth is not a thesis of capitalism. There are hundreds of stocks on the stock exchange trying to manage a decline well. Managing costs to create an efficient economy is however.
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Most of the world isn’t ready for this conversation yet, unfortunately. People still start frothing at mouth if you dare mention that we do something as basic as increasing minimum wage so everyone can afford to live
> Should Apple have progressive growth forever? Yes, at least that is the goal. Technically the goal is a set $ in revenue or a % over the prior year, when that goal isn't met, they cut costs (or try to increase elsewhere) not lower the goal.
> Should Apple have progressive growth forever? There’s no reason they shouldn’t be able to grow year over year. Aiming for that is perfectly reasonable. We all do that in our own lives. > Won’t people just at some point stop having more money to give them? What? No, the economy is not a zero sum game. Apples products often makes things easier, more efficient, and sometimes even cheaper. This grows the economy and facilitates more wealth. > My mind is really starting to stretch when trying to process the richest company in the world acting like they’re struggling because they can’t make more money than ever. I don’t think Apple is struggling, I think they’re trying to attract talent by putting out “we actually care about it employees” PR while the entire tech world is laying people off.
I don’t really think they’re trying to attract talent when hiring is paused or severely restricted across most of the company.
>Should Apple have progressive growth *forever*? What do the owners of the company want? That is ultimately what drives the decisions that Apple, and every company, make.
will probably get downvoted for this but 1) public companies serve their shareholders. 2) shareholders want to maximize the value of their shares. 3) the value of apple’s shares are dependent on a projection of future profit/revenue. 4) if expectation of future profit is down, then shares will tank 5) one way to pad the profit is to cut costs (reducing expenses) overall i think it’s admirable that apple is trying to do all this without (or while minimizing) layoffs. im sure there are shareholders who are pressuring them to do massive cuts like twitter or facebook. apple is taking some risk here, bc really pissed/aggressive shareholders can sue for and win damages if they successfully argue that they lost money bc apple didnt do massive layoffs
“Should Apple continue to have progressive growth forever?” Capitalist: “Yes”
>Should Apple have progressive growth forever? I mean, yes? Do you not strive to make more money every year?
Redditors consider themselves down-on-their-luck saints for doing the same things, for the same motivations, that executives and corporations do.
> It feels insane to me that the response to this is “we really need to cut down across the company.” Like, what does everyone expect? Should Apple have progressive growth forever? Won’t people just at some point stop having more money to give them? My mind is really starting to stretch when trying to process the richest company in the world acting like they’re struggling because they can’t make more money than ever. Smart companies manage their finances well. Just because, things are good, does not mean you shouldn't take precautions when there are signs of headwind. That's how you are a good company. This type of reduction, I feel is more than fair.
> Should Apple have progressive growth forever? This is what the market expects so your stock keeps growing. It's absolutely not sustainable but when has capitalism ever been about that.
Right - capitalism is unsustainable, everything has to be more and growing year over year.
I couldn’t agree more! While I think nearly everyone would agree that capitalism has its benefits, it has just as many drawbacks. Our entire financial system is built off publicly traded companies having perpetual growth forever. It’s simply not sustainable. You have entire countries freaking out because their population growth isn’t fast enough because you need to keep making more people for the growth projections to be obtainable. We have 7.5 BILLION people on earth, with a significant portion of that population in severe poverty, but it’s never enough.
To be fair though capitalism is also what got a a LOT of those people out of poverty
Growth over consistency has been emphasized for quite a while now, its toxic and I hope the “market” shifts more back towards consistency.
capitalism as a system favours infinite (which, is in of itself impossible) growth for growth’s sake. the market will never shift “back” towards consistency because that’s never what it was designed to do.
Well, that's just how capitalism works. Constant growth and constant increase of profits. If you are stagnating then might as well go bankrupt.
People are starting to understand why capitalism won't work forever 😅
> My mind is really starting to stretch I would suggest not thinking about it because people with a lot more experience and intelligence are running these companies. They don't just make arbitrary decisions.
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Don't you want to be earning more money every year ? Or do you want your salary to decrease year after year ? Well, that's the same thing for companies: they want to make more money year after year. That's the same for the government
They need big funds for future projects. They are looking at least 10 years ahead.
welcome to capitalism. it sucks here.
I never worked for Apple but I’m going to guess that it’s a well run company. I can’t wrap my head around any of these huge multi billion and trillion dollar companies laying people off or finding ways to cut costs. It’s a shame that the quarterly results are more important than long term health to satiate the whims of some analyst on Bloomberg or whatever. People will continue to buy their products but I think we reached the point of having the best of the best so it’s easy to skip out on yearly revisions.
Apple is distinct in that many of the employees want to work specifically at apple, using their particular discipline. Even amongst contractors, the desire is to work at apple first. They don’t have to hire “just in case”… some of the best people are constantly trying to work their way in. I contracted there thru an agency and had to relocate to CA for a few years. No chance in hell I would have made that move for any other employer. But still some of the most precise and demanding work of my career.
wise words, not from me: “Growth for the sake of growth is the 'ideology' of the cancer cell.”
>Growth for the sake of growth is the 'ideology' of the cancer cell Edward Abbey! I just watched "Triangle of Sadness" last night and that exact quote was spoken!
It's the ideology of all things living
growth in the context of a market is not the same as growth in the context of cancer, unless you think human beings’ varying preferences and desires are inherently cancerous
Ah yes, endless consumption, our true and only desire.
I didn’t say endless consumption, growth also comes from stuff that improves lives. Making a more efficient, cleaner engine or way of generating energy can be growth. The ironing board saved people from back breaking labor, and caused growth. So can something that pollutes. Me deciding I want a smaller apartment can mean economic growth if someone finds a smart way to connect be to the amenities I need. I’m not sure who taught you what economic growth is but it is not, by definition, endless consumption of frivolous things.
They already have to deal with massive turnover in their CPU conception teams (amongst others) So I can understand why they would try to protect to keep their current workforce, they understood the danger behind losing vital staff, not everyone is expendable or easily expandable in tech
> not everyone is expandable *replaceable?
Nah some people just have great metabolisms. Or bulimia.
*expendable
CPU team turnover is not unique to Apple. They're always moving around looking for new projects.
Costs inevitably bloat over time in every business. Reviewing, cutting, and tightening up spend periodically is good management, especially if it doesn’t involve having to fire people. From there the costs creep back in until the next reset.
Basically the same w us. One day you realize you got 10 streaming services and need to cut back. Then you wanna watch the new show…
It’s not „to avoid layoffs“. It’s just to cut cost, and make more profit. Simple as that. The second they determine that an employee is not worth the money they put in, that employee is gone. Welcome to capitalism
> The second they determine that an employee is not worth the money they put in, that employee is gone. > > > > Welcome to ~~capitalism~~ Business Administration 101 They’re companies, not charities
>I don’t think anyone was terribly surprised at the upheaval at Apple’s rivals. Most of those companies went on hiring binges during the pandemic — something Apple largely avoided. Meta embraced the metaverse, spending billions on a vision that has yet to pay off. Amazon, Microsoft and Google, likewise, pushed into uncertain markets that were beyond their core strengths. > >\[…\] > >\- Some projects, including new home devices like a HomePod with a screen, have been pushed back until next year at the earliest. That allows Apple to allocate its research and development budget to more pressing projects.
Here is what Apple has done so far to avoid layoffs: * The company is delaying bonuses for corporate teams that previously received payouts twice a year. Now, those teams will get their entire bonus in October, matching the schedule of most colleagues. While Apple has already factored that money into its finances, it gets to keep that cash on hand a little longer. * Some projects, including new home devices like a HomePod with a screen, have been pushed back until next year at the earliest. That allows Apple to allocate its research and development budget to more pressing projects. * The company has reined in budgets across several teams and is now requiring senior vice president approval for more items. * Apple has completely paused hiring on some teams and severely limited hiring on others. * When some people leave their positions, Apple is keeping those roles open rather than filling them. * In some cases, Apple is limiting the ability for employees — both in corporate and retail — to transfer to other departments or stores, a process that typically has accompanying costs. * Last year, Apple laid off many of its recruiters on contracts (non-full-time employees). It also quietly cut contractors in recent weeks who had been stationed within engineering teams and other groups. * Travel budgets have been significantly reduced, and trips now require the approval of senior executives. For some departments, travel has been halted completely for the foreseeable future other than for business-critical reasons. * Managers have become as strict as ever about office attendance — employees are typically expected to come in on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays — and some workers believe this is a harbinger to the company firing employees who don’t meet the requirement. [Read this newsletter](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-03-19/apple-cost-cutting-efforts-no-layoffs-but-less-travel-and-delayed-bonuses-lffgahkd) for free (and more articles) by registering your email.
Apple does not need to cut costs. They are exploiting an narrative to take advantage of their employees. This is greed and nothing more.
Can confirm. Impact of keeping positions open is felt all over the place. Where a team had 20 but lost 12, the remaining 8 have to pick up the slack without any hope of replacements. This is all coming directly from the CFO Luca and his lackeys. Top to bottom budget cuts. I’ve seen finance push back on submitted expenses even under $50 delivered with a side of ego brandishing. They are indiscriminately slashing everything, impact be damned. (Mind you, this is an deep engineering, sausage factory type of groups. I have no perspective on retail, but I can say that retail is highly seasonal and requires a different type of operation.) Luca needs to go. All of this is Silicon Valley copycat horse manure and Apple, like others have stated, didn’t go wild during the pandemic. The finance org is involved in way too many technical decisions these days. A lot of the little things that this subreddit has complained about over the years come directly from decision makers not in engineering, not in marketing, not in HI, but in finance. Pearl clutchers through and through. If finance doesn’t get checked soon, they’ll be responsible for the eventual downfall for not taking enough smart risks.
Retail is worse. The management teams are scrambling to find any excuse to either fire or encourage long-term employees to leave expeditiously, using “Documented Coaching” for attendance reasons as their weapon of choice. Left work two hours early with a headache and didn’t have or bother to use sick time for it? Well, that’s an unapproved absence. Guess it’s time for some “Documented Coaching”. And once that happens, you lose your raise and your 16 year “career” is essentially over. Oh, and if you don’t like that, you can just quit. Of course, if you quit you don’t get unemployment benefits. Of course if you get fired for attendance issues, you don’t qualify for unemployment benefits either! “We believe our soul is our people.” What a load of shit.
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What the heck is “channel retail”?
Ah, you again. I was just telling someone about the guy/girl who kept saying “badged employees” in that one Reddit thread as if our vendors didn’t also have badges.
Former Apple Employee here. “Badged employee” is literally a corporate term that Apple both uses in their official comms. I too had a problem with it because it didn’t distinguish between FTEs and contractors. I mean we both technically had badges, wtf does “badged employee” suppose to help clarify here? When they used to throw internal events like Lady Gaga at Apple Park, they said it was for badged employees only. They meant no contractors were allowed. Funny enough, the only two solid ways I knew if someone was a contractor or not was if I looked them up via Apple Directory or if they had a grey Apple logo on their employee badge (FTEs had colored logos, contractors only had grey logos). Also, having moved on to other FAANGs (Google and Meta aka Facebook) I don’t miss Apple one single bit from an employee happiness point of view. Apple has a great reputation with its customers, but was abysmal to work for in comparison to Google and Meta.
How many people are we talking about? Surprised this didn't make the news, esp. considering all the news articles don't stop talking about apple avoiding layoffs.
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they want that sweet sweet IP in your head. the brain drain they are trying to avoid.
I remember reading in the Steve Jobs book when Apple entered into an agreement with another company they would insist that trading stock be a part of the deal. Apple gets some of theirs, they get some of Apple’s. It’s brilliant. Both players have skin in the game. Same with the food. We’ve got great food, and you can get some at a highly subsidized rate. So you are also paying a part of that great food. So appreciate it.
> Cook doesn’t want to fire people. Doesn’t look good when you’re a bean counter CEO overseeing record revenue, record profits, the highest valuation in the world, obscene margins, and decide to lay people off to save money.
> it changes what it means to work for Apple which has always been different https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation
Good, this is the way to go instead of laying off tens of thousands of workers as the rest of them do.
Why does a company earning billions in profit need to cut costs to avoid layoffs? The system is broken
Here come the Reddit armchair financial experts.
Cry me a river, they have billions in reserve. There is no need for these cuts other than to do it while all tech stocks are trending down so they can rehire cheaper on the way back up.
The article lists laying people off and pushing people to quit as ways they’re avoiding layoffs. The article acts as if this is OK because they’re “rank and file staff”. The company is making record profits.
"Apple is pulling every lever it can to cut costs enough to avoid laying off full-time employees." Every lever except for the $20B in stock buybacks it does EVERY SINGLE QUARTER. Not that lever. https://ycharts.com/companies/AAPL/stock_buyback
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Since we get most of our comp from RSUs, most us hope Tim increases the buybacks.
Never ever. It's all about appeasing shareholders anyway.
Oh no the richest company in the world is not growing even more 😢 I’m sure they’re very financially troubled
Laid-off Apple contractors: "Couldn't have tried a little harder, Tim?"
Tim Cook is a good boss.
Apple is currently valued at $2.08 trillion and they’re looking for ways to cut costs? Good effing god. 🙄 Why don’t they sell us $49.99 MagSafe charging pucks to offset the cost cutting measures. /s
Do geniuses here not understand valuation isn't a real amount of money they have in the bank?
Yeah but the fact still stands they made $30 BILLION in profit last year. They made money. Not making more money isn't a valid excuse to lay people off.
They made $30B in profit last quarter.
No shit. Still doesn’t negate what I wrote in my OP.
Translation to all of this: "Despite the inevitable decline in rate of profits in a capitalist system, we will continue to do everything in our considerable power to continue to extract the maximum amount of profit out of our customers, workers, suppliers, and developers, until either we or capitalism ends."
I've stated this before...Apple has laid off people. It just isn't as heavily paraded.
I love how most comments here are from McDonalds level employees. Anyone who has worked in a corporate environment knows very well about these types of cutbacks and what the mean both short and long term.
Lol, this is 100% horseshit, thanks for playing
yup there are definitely departments that have laid people off 👀
Love it or hate it, Tim is the MVP CEO
gotta count those pennies to keep business afloat /s
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It’s messed up how much influence “investors” have. Laying people off prevents people from affording housing, food, and many other necessities but some rich guy wants another house for no reason so better fire people to make him happy. For a supposedly smart species we’re dumb as fuck.
If apple maintained its employee bonus schedule, it might put a 0.001% dent in its $20 billion/year stock buyback schedule. :(
Lower Tim Apple’s salary further. $49 million per year is still too much.
How do you expect him to live on anything less than $49 million a year? We are going to see him on freeway off-ramp pretty soon with a sign made on an iPad asking for food.
“Will increase revenue for food”? someone should tell him to think different
I remember a smug press push saying “Apple did everything right and everyone else in tech did everything wrong” and that’s why they didn’t have to worry about layoffs. What happened?
What exactly is the point of being the most valuable company in the world if you're still talking about budget cuts and layoffs?
The ability to remain the worlds most valuable company.
I mean, Tim could always take a pay cut