Recommended Posts

Over the past couple of weeks, we've been receiving reports that Apple has been laying off a number of recently-hired staff members at its retail stores. Most of the reports have been coming from Apple retail employees in the United Kingdom, but several of these reports claim that similar actions are taking place at stores around the world. We've also been receiving reports of long-term cutbacks in hours for part-time staff in the United States and Canada.

According to one report, all employees at a certain store in the United Kingdom with less than six months of service have been laid off, including a group that had been hired only one month ago and had just completed their training program. New hiring has also been halted, and internal company transfers between stores have been placed on hold.

Another report similarly indicates that a number of newly-hired employees have just been laid off, while several longer-term employees who had recently been promoted never received their pay increases and are now being demoted back to their previous positions.

http://www.businessi...-freezes-2012-8

Oh oh.. not everything rosy in the land of magic and unicorns? ;)

Link to comment
https://www.neowin.net/forum/topic/1098209-apple-laying-off-employees/
Share on other sites

Confusing given that they continue to harvest astronomical profits.. maybe some stores haven't been performing well? The UK economy is struggling a bit and maybe they're finding they're just not generating enough sales?

I like Apple and their products. While, I don't agree with everything they do, I don't agree with everything anyone does. However, I do believe that the next iPhone really holds Apples fate. People are starting to realize that they are buying the same phone over and over and there are better phones out there..

According to one report, all employees at a certain store in the United Kingdom with less than six months of service have been laid off, including a group that had been hired only one month ago and had just completed their training program.

What a bunch of douchebags, pardon my French.

Confusing given that they continue to harvest astronomical profits.. maybe some stores haven't been performing well? The UK economy is struggling a bit and maybe they're finding they're just not generating enough sales?

Since the Apple Store in Amsterdam opened I've been puzzled by the vast majority of employees present. It's hard to imagine the store actually making a profit. I've always seen the Apple Store as a huge advertisement pillar, not as something that directly makes Apple money.

  • Like 1

I guess times really are hard all over, even for Apple.

God forbid they should have to spend some of their billions in petty cash in keeping hard working front line employee's on. It's not as if these guys play a big role in promoting Apple to the user base, after all... :rolleyes:

If they need to save money, cut execs wages.

Maybe they have finally realised that the staff at the apple stores are really ****!! Especially in Belfast, they are absolutely useless, ignore customers, fixing their hair in the ipads and talking amongst themselves. Stupid wee ********.

This was a few years ago though.

If it was laying off proper jobs within Apple it would maybe be time to show some concern but for this segment........big deal lol

Since the Apple Store in Amsterdam opened I've been puzzled by the vast majority of employees present. It's hard to imagine the store actually making a profit. I've always seen the Apple Store as a huge advertisement pillar, not as something that directly makes Apple money.

*Vast amount of employees I meant.

Since the Apple Store in Amsterdam opened I've been puzzled by the vast majority of employees present. It's hard to imagine the store actually making a profit. I've always seen the Apple Store as a huge advertisement pillar, not as something that directly makes Apple money.

That's what I thought. Even stores like Bestbuy are doing this. They know that online retail is where the money is at once your name is big enough. Apple's stores are nothing but advertising and ****ing wars with Microsoft. There biggest selling products don't need their own brick and mortar store to sell when they are now sold a nearly all mobile phone companies as well as department stores. These stores should only be staffing the minimum required. Just because you have billions of dollars stashed away doesn't mean you should be wasting it. You don't get that kind of money wasting it on random things just because they are small in comparison. That is how you lose that amount of money. Overtime, the small things add up.

I've always thought the Apple stores were overstaffed by about 300%. Last time I got an iPhone, 3 people came over to do the transaction. :huh:

Not to mention, the products basically sell themselves. There's very little upselling there these days, even on the computers, and they don't have boxed software any more.

  • Like 1
This topic is now closed to further replies.
  • Posts

    • The laptop in the bedroom is an Acer with i7-10510U CPU. Acer's website states they will not be upgrading it so I had little choice other than disable secure boot. I know next to nothing on these matters so hopefully it will be fine.
    • GitHub removes manual model selection from Copilot free and student plans by Karthik Mudaliar GitHub is removing the ability to manually select an AI model from its Copilot Free and Student plans, making its automatic routing system the default and only way to choose a model. This means users on these tiers will no longer be able to deliberately select a particular OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, or Microsoft model for a task. In its announcement, GitHub said Copilot Auto will dynamically choose what it considers the best model for each request. Free and Student accounts will retain access to models from multiple families, although the available selection will continue to depend on the restrictions attached to each plan. GitHub did not identify a fixed pool of models that Auto will always use, and its documentation warns that model availability can change over time. GitHub describes Auto as more than a random fallback system. On supported surfaces, its task-optimization technology evaluates the complexity of a request alongside real-time information about model health and availability. Straightforward prompts can be routed to faster and less expensive models, while more demanding coding tasks may be sent to higher-cost reasoning models. The company says this approach should reduce rate limiting, latency, and failed requests. Auto generally selects one model along natural prompt-caching boundaries rather than repeatedly switching models during a session, as GitHub found that mid-session changes increased costs without producing sufficient improvements in output quality. Users can still check which model generated a response. In Copilot Chat, the information appears when hovering over an answer, while Copilot CLI and the Copilot cloud agent display the selected model alongside their output. Auto is available in Copilot Chat, Copilot CLI, and the cloud agent, with the exact implementation and release status varying between supported development environments. The latest restriction follows several months of adjustments to Copilot’s individual plans. GitHub temporarily halted new Pro, Pro+, and Student subscriptions in April as it sought to manage demand and service reliability. It later introduced token-based billing and began gradually reopening individual-plan registrations on June 17. Alongside the picker change, GitHub is retiring the “Preview” label from Microsoft-developed models. It argues that the label is no longer necessary because Auto handles model routing and models are continuously updated behind the scenes.
    • Look up 'inflation' kid. Ask an AI for the numbers between both games.
    • Google reportedly set to lose two key Gemini and DeepMind researchers to Anthropic by Karthik Mudaliar Google is reportedly preparing to lose two more prominent artificial intelligence researchers, with Gemini contributors Jonas Adler and Alexander Pritzel planning to join rival AI developer Anthropic. According to a report from Bloomberg, both researchers are viewed internally as important contributors to Google’s flagship Gemini model family. Adler worked on Google’s AI coding efforts, while Pritzel was involved in the process used to train AI systems. Neither company has publicly confirmed the moves. The report also does not say when the researchers will formally leave Google or what positions they will hold at Anthropic. Training a large AI model requires decisions covering its architecture, data preparation, distributed computing infrastructure, and post-training methods that shape how the finished system behaves. Researchers with experience operating at the scale of Gemini are consequently difficult to replace quickly. Both Adler and Pritzel have previously contributed to Google DeepMind’s scientific research as well. They are listed among the authors of the company’s work on expanding AlphaFold protein-structure predictions across entire proteomes, alongside AlphaFold researchers including John Jumper. The reported departures arrive shortly after another important change within Google’s Gemini organization. Gemini co-lead Noam Shazeer is leaving Google for OpenAI, after returning to the search company in 2024 through its deal with Character.AI. Shazeer is particularly well known as one of the authors of the Transformer paper, whose architecture became the foundation for most modern large language models. Anthropic, meanwhile, has been recruiting recognizable figures from other leading laboratories. OpenAI co-founder and former Tesla AI director Andrej Karpathy joined Anthropic’s pre-training team in May. His move, followed by the reported recruitment of several Google researchers, suggests Anthropic is strengthening the research teams responsible for the core capabilities of future Claude models rather than concentrating solely on product and enterprise sales. The competition is complicated by the companies’ extensive commercial relationships. Anthropic competes directly with Google’s Gemini models, but it also relies on Google as an infrastructure partner. In April, Anthropic announced an expanded agreement with Google and Broadcom covering multiple gigawatts of next-generation Tensor Processing Unit capacity. TPUs are Google-designed accelerators used to train and run large AI models. via Bloomberg
    • This article makes my head hurt. Lots of confusing words
  • Recent Achievements

    • Dedicated
      Scoobystu earned a badge
      Dedicated
    • First Post
      Tom Schmidt earned a badge
      First Post
    • One Month Later
      D0nn13 earned a badge
      One Month Later
    • Rookie
      +ChiefOfNeo went up a rank
      Rookie
    • One Year In
      Tom Schmidt earned a badge
      One Year In
  • Popular Contributors

    1. 1
      +primortal
      461
    2. 2
      +Edouard
      177
    3. 3
      PsYcHoKiLLa
      124
    4. 4
      Michael Scrip
      79
    5. 5
      Xenon
      76
  • Tell a friend

    Love Neowin? Tell a friend!