Apple fired employees after ambitious ‘Car’ project failure

Apple has fired employees from the company after its two ambitious future projects about car and smartwatch displays failed.

Apple has been rumored to developing its car for years. This car has been making headlines for its, again rumored, full autonomy. Despite many efforts, the company began facing a lot of problems around autonomous driving as it had not even released a single model in the market prior to this project.

Aiming directly at an autonomous car turned into a disaster for the Cupertino-based tech company. Therefore, it has rescaled the scope of this car project several times in the past.

Apple also tried to change the scope into an electric vehicle instead of a fully autonomous car. However, the news of it finally giving up on the project appeared earlier this year.

Apple is estimated to lost billions of dollars in this rumored project which never made it to the public. Similarly, the iPhone maker was also developing a high-quality display smartwatch featuring MicroLEDs.

This type of display panel provides higher brightness, lower latency, better contrast, color saturation, and other key elements which makes it the best choice for equipping a new device.

On the other hand, there are some challenges around its development and its heavy pricing which stops manufacturers from opting for microLEDs.

Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman said that over 600 employees had to leave their jobs when these two projects collapsed. These people were related to the corresponding projects on different job roles but were not disclosed in the report.

Other employees have been relocated to different job roles inside the firm. Gurman predicts that the real number could be even higher than what he has accessed through filing on the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) program.