Apple lets go of 600 workers in California

Apple (AAPL) is cutting over 600 workers in California, signaling the tech giant's first major wave of layoffs amid broader consolidation across the tech industry. Speculation is mounting that these cuts may be linked to the conclusion of the company's electric vehicle (EV) project.

Yahoo Finance's Seana Smith and Madison Mills breaks down the details.

For more expert insight and the latest market action, click here to watch this full episode of Yahoo Finance Live.

Editor's note: This article was written by Angel Smith

Video transcript

MADISON MILLS: Now we're going to move over to some company news because Apple cut over 600 jobs in California. That's according to a state filing and the filing did not specify what sector the cuts are in. But experts are speculating that it is related to the company abandoning their long running project to build an electric self-driving car.

And Seana, what I think is particularly interesting about this, is that these are notices that are filed with the state of California. So we know right now that it's 600 jobs but it could be significantly more given that some employees could be in other places of the country of course.

And we're anticipating that this is again related to project Titan, the cars project. But also the display project as well that they were working on, so curious to see how this number kind of develops long term and what the scope of it is.

SEANA SMITH: Yeah. And I think when we initially got this news that Apple was abandoning its EV car plans. A lot of the thought there was some of those workers were then going to be moved and used for their AI initiatives and their interest in research within that department. But the layoffs I think, for Apple also brings up the fact of a trend that we've seen since the start of the year.

We have certainly seen a number of these larger tech companies announce layoffs actually. I mean, take a look at the tech sector, that sector accounted for the largest portion of job cuts of any of the major sectors here in Q1.

So I think the question a lot of people are asking, when we talk about the resilience overall of the labor market is whether or not some of that trend that we saw in terms of trimming headcount in the first quarter specifically within the tech sector, whether or not we are going to see a further contraction within tech with an employee headcount? Or if we're going to start to see a shift?

If it's leveled out just a bit, we were talking to one of LinkedIn's economists earlier in last hour. And he was talking about the fact that he does expect that to level off just a bit, that tech companies are hiring once again and hiring has increased just a bit or interest to hire has increased a little bit on their platform.

But when you've got a big name like Apple, that is cutting jobs here. It's grabbing the attention, refocusing some of its focus here in terms of the AI initiatives. It's going to make investors think twice just about what some of those longer term goals are here for the company.