Mark Gurman

And this sales division, they partner with carriers across the world to sell iPhones, but they also partner with enterprises, large-scale businesses, government organizations, schools, educational institutions.

And over the course of this month, there was a big streamlining, rounds of layoffs, including, like I said, several dozen people.

There were account managers, they are called account executives for specific government agencies, for specific university systems.

people who partner in pitch companies on buying Apple products.

There are these tiny Apple store-like fixtures called briefing centers at Apple offices in California and Texas, and the people managing that, for the most part, were laid off as well.

And so those products are still going to sell, but

Quite a bit of a shake up here for Apple, sells products and delivers these devices to the major customers.

And of course, as you said, a rare layoff for Apple.

Yeah, you know, I don't think this has much to do with AI.

I think this has to do with cutting roles internally to lower costs because they realize most of these sales are happening from the channel, and there's a lot of duplicate efforts internally with the channel, so the third-party retailers.

So I think it's just one of your classic layoffs to create more efficiency and cost-cutting rather than having much to do with artificial intelligence.

In terms of layoffs related to AI at Apple, I guess the only thing you've seen related to AI from Apple that has to touch a layoff was the self-driving car project job cuts of 1,000 people in the beginning of 2024.

And that was actually to do more AI rather than because of AI.

So they moved a lot of those folks over to the generative AI division.

But I haven't seen any job cuts at Apple to date because of AI.

That doesn't mean they're not going to happen, but so far they haven't.

Yeah.