Apple cuts jobs in second layoff round in two months, report says

Apple has reportedly conducted a second round of layoffs in less than two months. As per a new report, the company has cut a handful of jobs in its Fitness+ team. This comes after as many as 200 employees were laid off last month.

In Short

• A handful of Apple Fitness+ were laid off, report says
• Apple may want to reduce spending on Fitness+
• Previously, Apple fired 200 employees across VR and Siri teams

The tech industry is going through a difficult period with almost every major company laying off workers. Apple seems to be no different in this scenario. As per a new report, the tech giant has conducted a second round of layoffs in just under two months.

As per a report from Bloomberg, Apple laid off a handful of employees in its Fitness+ team last week. This move is said to have affected staff working on the audio side of the service, including features such as Time to Walk and Time to Run, which users can access on an Apple Watch without watching a video. The report said new audio releases are expected to become less frequent, though they are not being discontinued for now.

Fitness+ is Apple’s subscription workout service and has been positioned as a rival to offerings such as Peloton, particularly for Apple Watch users looking for guided exercise content.

Previous Apple layoffs

The Fitness+ jobs cuts follow another round of layoffs reported in August across teams working on Siri, Vision Pro and Intelligent Systems Experience, a unit within Apple’s software engineering organisation responsible for some AI features.

According to reports, the earlier cuts affected more than 200 workers, including about 100 roles in the Vision Pro organisation and another 100 across Siri and software teams. Apple said at the time that it was realigning some teams “to evolve our business to deliver the best experiences for our users” and that, while new roles would be created, “a limited number of existing roles” would be affected.

Apple may want to reduce spending on Fitness+

The report adds that these job cuts within the Fitness+ team may be the start of more substantial cost-cutting and structural changes in the months and years ahead. Reports have also strengthened speculation that Apple may eventually combine parts of Fitness+ with its Health app.

While the report says that the service itself is not believed to be under immediate threat, Fitness+ is an area where Apple could look to reduce spending because of the costs involved, the constant need for new content and subscriber churn.

The latest report also tied the cuts to Apple’s broader health plans. Apple is already adding video clips to a rumoured Health app revamp to explain topics and benchmarks. It is believed that Fitness+ could ultimately be integrated into that platform now that the functions sit within the same operation.

Beyond Apple, the tech industry has witnessed major layoff rounds globally. Oracle, for instance, has laid off thousands of workers this month amid rising AI costs. Whereas Uber recently laid off over 3,000 employees. Even non-tech companies are reducing their tech teams. Adidas cut 20 per cent of its Indian tech team earlier this month.

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