Apple hands out pink slips to 100 employees including some working in the Books and News apps

Citing people familiar with the matter, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman said on Tuesday that Apple has decided to let go of 100 workers in its digital services unit. The employees worked for different teams in Apple's Services unit, the company's second-largest business segment after the iPhone. Led by Senior Vice President Eddy Cue, Services took in $85.2 billion in revenue during fiscal 2023.

The largest cuts involved those working for the Apple Book app and the Apple Bookstore. Also impacted mightily by the job cuts was the team running Apple News. The sources told Bloomberg that they wished not to be identified because news of the layoffs has not officially been announced by Apple. Some of the employees cut had engineering jobs.

Apple reportedly no longer sees Apple Books as a major part of its Services business even though the Books app is still expected to get new features over time according to Bloomberg's sources. And the reduction in the headcount over at Apple News is not supposed to be an indication that Apple News is becoming less important to Apple's Services unit.

While layoffs are a rare occurrence in Cupertino, Apple has had four rounds of job reductions this year alone starting with the shuttering of the self-driving car project in February. That was followed by the decision to let go of the team working to produce microLED displays in-house. Another series of layoffs took place in San Diego earlier this year.

Back in fiscal 2017, Apple's top brass thought that iPhone sales might have peaked so it set a goal to expand the revenue of the Services group from $30 billion to $50 billion by fiscal 2020. Not only did Apple achieve the goal, but it has kept going. The unit accounted for 22% of Apple's top line in fiscal 2023 more than doubling from the less than 10% of total revenue the unit took in 10 years ago. Apple's decision to focus on Services paid off exactly as the company hoped it would since the unit's strong growth more than made up for periods when device sales were slow.

Employees let go were supposedly told by Apple that they would have 60 days to find another job inside the tech giant before they would be officially terminated by the firm.