In the past few months, we have closely followed numerous rumors about the «Apple Car», supposed electric car and / or self-guided by Ma: a war against Tesla involving hiring of specialists, possible partnerships with companies in the automotive sector, documents which indicate that the ?Project Titan? (name given to the car project) really exists, mass hiring, Steve Jobs’ interest in cars back in 2008, an industry executive impressed with what Apple is doing, Tim Cook speaking openly about the automotive market, codenames for the buildings used for the project, conversations with companies specializing in charging stations for electric cars, among many other things.
Despite a possible delay to 2021, the first news spoke of a launch in 2020, at least in the world of rumors everything was going relatively well. Of course, like any project in development, problems happen, problems appear none of this novelty. But at least according to the New York Times, it seems that things got pretty bad.
Based on information from three sources, the New York-based newspaper said Apple closed parts of the project and laid off dozens of employees in contention for one of the company’s most ambitious initiatives. Internally, however, the workers who remained were informed that the layoffs are part of a reboot of the car project which even makes sense considering the recent return of Bob Mansfield (former Apple senior executive who had retired but returned to work at the company), who took over and promoted a change in the focus of the project , moving from an emphasis on the design and production of a car to the construction of the technology underlying an autonomous vehicle.
Not long ago, for example, with Mansfield at the helm, the company hired Dan Dodge, founder and CEO of QNX (company responsible for developing the operating system of the same name that equips the control systems of a series of cars from the most diverse brands ).
Still, it seems that some of the employees are caught wondering what Apple could bring to this electric / self-driving car market that other companies (which are already openly working on it, like Alphabet, Tesla, Uber, etc.) couldn’t . And, in my opinion, this is a question that only they (involved in the project) can answer.
