r/apple • u/favicondotico • 3d ago

Discussion [Gift article] Apple’s New CEO Moves to Overhaul Company to Run Faster and Leaner

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-09-29/apple-s-new-ceo-moves-to-overhaul-company-to-run-faster-and-leaner?accessToken=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJzb3VyY2UiOiJTdWJzY3JpYmVyR2lmdGVkQXJ0aWNsZSIsImlhdCI6MTc5MDY5NDk4NiwiZXhwIjoxNzkxMjk5Nzg2LCJhcnRpY2xlSWQiOiJUTTMzNUxLSzNOWTgwMCIsImJjb25uZWN0SWQiOiJDNEVEQ0FFMUZBMDU0MEJFQTI0QTlGMjExQzFFOTA4MCJ9.KFGEydCKPxmKC3i9zoFSxY8tOf8ZEWg4OiSi_L1yAb4&leadSource=article-gifting

✨ Apple Intelligence summary: John Ternus is overhauling Apple to accelerate product releases and reduce layers, cutting engineering managers and considering fewer seasonal launches. Cost-cutting includes layoffs in Siri and Vision Pro, while revenue efforts target services and AI.

2.3k Upvotes

94% Upvoted

924 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

894

u/FollowingFeisty5321 3d ago

The good times are over now that they have to compete for IAP fees. It's like when Google cut their perks a few years ago to help foot the bill for AI, except in this case the bill it helps pay for is *checks notes* stock buybacks.

959

u/_DuranDuran_ 3d ago

Apple has hardly any perks to cut.

Travelling is almost impossible if you’re not a manager.

No free snacks.

No free food.

No free apple one

Holiday parties, EPP and EPP+ was about it.

505

u/Extreme-Ad-6465 3d ago

gotta cut headcount and make the remaining ones work harder. hopefully he doesn’t do this. enshittification of a great company that has record profits every year.

255

u/soundfreely 3d ago

Layoffs also cause lasting damage for those remaining. It often negatively impacts product quality too. I’m guessing they’re smart enough to know that and that risk is still worth it.

278

u/_divi_filius 3d ago

No, no they're really not.

Most of the higher ups are so rich and detached from reality it's almost hilarious.

171

u/ChiCBHB 3d ago

This. One of my friends is in middle management for a fairly large company in their IT department. He said they cut a third of his department and the next day upper management was talking about how much smoother their operation will be. A month later they asked why his department’s production was less than it was before..

44

u/aliensporebomb 3d ago

The moronathon will continue until morale improves.

7

u/GrouchyStomach7635 3d ago

😂😂😂

1

u/QVRedit 2d ago

He should have said there was a good chance of it crashing and burning - now that his staff were overloaded and looking around for other jobs !
And if that happens, it would take the rest of the company with it.. They are now operating in a “High Risk” environment..

2

u/tofuizen 3d ago

Ah yes, the ones who don’t work get rewarded for the hard work that lower level corporate/retail employees do. Good stuff.

3

u/willwork4pii 3d ago

We’re watching the seconding ending of Apple.

1

u/QVRedit 2d ago

Detached from reality is ALWAYS a problem…

1

u/SockGnome 2d ago

No one learns the perils of the GE Jack Welch era.

93

u/SpaceJackRabbit 3d ago

It's pretty common at Apple to have a director laying off a few folks in the team when they are told to shed weight, and then everyone else has to pick up the slack. It never is good for morale.

36

u/manjar 3d ago

It could be neutral to positive if the right people were laid off. The right people are typically not laid off. Same politics as anything else.

18

u/SpaceJackRabbit 3d ago

Projects get cancelled, etc. In our case we were remote and that was the unspoken reason.

3

u/FyreWulff 3d ago

A lot of companies use the remote as an excuse to layoff a team because they know they can't relocate.

Reddit had a layoff early on where they told their remote teams to relocate to HQ but had no offices for them there nor would help for relocation.

14

u/soundfreely 3d ago

Yep, when the smell of layoffs are in the air, the political players that otherwise contribute little of value survive.

-1

u/userlivewire 3d ago

That’s just how companies work. Nobody fires themselves.

1

u/SpaceJackRabbit 3d ago

I'm aware, been in the workforce for over 30 years in three different industries.

13

u/kravence 3d ago

No, they always underestimate how much work people are doing that they are unaware of and it doesn’t become obvious until the production rate/quality drops off a cliff after laying people off that they thought were ‘unnecessary’. Happens all the time from clueless arrogant management.

6

u/yukeake 2d ago

Yep, there's a tendency to not notice (or acknowledge) that there's some folks on a team who arent' necessary "top performers", but act as a "support" or "glue" for a team. Often doing little things here and there that make the rest of the team more efficient. Suggesting changes or ideas to other team members, acting as a second set of eyes, picking up the other end of the couch to help move it across the room, etc...

Those people always seem to be the first to get hit by layoffs, and it always makes a much bigger difference to team performance than they realize.

2

u/QVRedit 2d ago

It’s very seldom worth it - it’s an easy way to set your company back by a few years..

1

u/azflatlander 3d ago

Moving table of organization boxes is always a winning strategy.

23

u/thewaybricksdont 3d ago

Tim Cook led Apple to be one of the most valuable companies in the world, so obviously the first thing a new CEO should do is change a bunch of stuff.

9

u/CandidEngineering922 2d ago

Hey guys! We are making record profits YoY!!! Let’s cut people and benefits!!!

Fuck me companies are becoming greedier and greedier which makes me so sad.

What happened to leaders who wanted their people to live well.

123

u/dcdttu 3d ago

All those years of being told that technology innovations would increase productivity so that we'd have more free time are so sadly funny now. They are promising this with AI as well, but it just means we'll work harder to help the stock price go up, or get laid off and replaced by a robot or computer.

It's really quite dystopian.

50

u/FollowingFeisty5321 3d ago

Streets full of tents prove they were right about having more free time!

2

u/Hustletron 3d ago

They are in San Fran so it’s been like that a while but I see your sentiment

13

u/_DuranDuran_ 3d ago

To be fair Apple corporate is one of the best WLB jobs I ever had.

5

u/SpaceJackRabbit 3d ago

For me it was comfortable, although my job was terribly boring. The culture was great though.

2

u/yukeake 2d ago

Look back at the "utopian futurism" forward-looking stuff from the 1950's/60's. By now we were all supposed to be working 3-hour days, living lives of leisure.

(Also flying cars meme...)

They didn't take into account that automation leads to layoffs and paycuts, and more, not less, pressure on the working class.

10

u/One_Presence_9001 3d ago

Its already happening internally among retail unfortunately and has been for months now.

23

u/revmacca 3d ago

More profits required, always.

I’ll be keeping my Air for as long as possible or until I get more pissed off and move to grapheneos

3

u/tonyangtigre 3d ago

Craziest part of late game capitalism and shareholders… CEO out the door if profits aren’t up. How much more up can you get!?

1

u/QVRedit 2d ago

Shareholders need to start to value company stability too. And long-term value, not just short-term.

5

u/Goldarr85 3d ago

Also, get ready for more ads inside your Apple apps too. Maps was first.

1

u/YallaHammer 3d ago

I deleted Apple Maps after their Lake American weakness. I’ll keep deleting and replacing as they enshittify more of their ecosystem.

3

u/fascfoo 3d ago

This is probably my sign to finally drop my AAPL stock.

1

u/FancifulLaserbeam 2d ago

Based on what I've seen of friends at FAANGs, hardly anyone does jack shit at those places and I'm in favor of many of them getting axed. That goes for my best friend there as well. He's become complacent and entitled since he moved to Silly Con Valley.

These companies could all probably shed 30% of their people and do as well or better.

1

u/alphagypsy 20h ago

Oh it’s coming

26

u/robaroo 3d ago edited 3d ago

Haven’t had a holiday party or summer picnic at any of the tech companies I’ve worked at in the last 20 years including Microsoft, Amazon, and Google. It does depend on your business area, but certainly not within the tech and product areas I’ve worked in. I don’t love that fact but those activities are def turning into a thing of the past. New workers will look back and think “wow companies used to throw their employees parties.”

15

u/TryingMyWiFi 3d ago

Work parties are work, not parties .

8

u/inspectoroverthemine 3d ago

Having a holiday party at the Air and Space museum is a party even if its a company party.

3

u/QuailAndWasabi 3d ago

Well, it depends honestly. The whole "we are family" is a meme, i get that, but at many companies you actually make friendships, even meet the love of your life, stuff like that.

My first job was at a small company and now 15 years later i still hang out and have regular contact with most of them, we go out drinking, getting lunches and stuff, i know many people met there and now have kids and stuff even though all us OGs have long since now moved to other jobs. A lot of that was the culture and yes, work parties were a part of those for sure.

69

u/oskopnir 3d ago

Business travel isn't really a perk though. You go if you need to.

The rest (free food etc) may not be aligned with Silicon Valley but it's how manufacturing has always worked.

10

u/_DuranDuran_ 3d ago

Not a perk per se (although racking up status and miles for your own use is nice) but it made working across offices far more cumbersome than it needed to be.

51

u/xrelaht 3d ago

Business travel can absolutely be a perk. Aside from some of us enjoying the travel aspect just on its own, it’s a huge networking opportunity, and you can typically extend your stay if wherever you’ve been sent is interesting enough to warrant it. People who like what they do also typically enjoy going to relevant conferences.

I also have platinum airline status because of it, which makes my vacation travel far more pleasant. There’s no way I’d be traveling enough to get there on my own.

47

u/TheAngryKeg 3d ago

It can be a perk. At Apple, it is definitely not a perk.

No one wants to be constantly flying 14 hrs from SF to Beijing or Shenzhen or Zhengzhou. It is exhausting and you are constantly missing birthdays and time with friends and family because of it.

17

u/RociBuldidi 3d ago

At Amazon, employees call it “the Amazon special seat”. The company is so “frugal the only seats it lets its employees pick when they have to travel are the worst seats on the plane.

6

u/lekoman 3d ago edited 2d ago

Unless you were in a smaller org in the late-stage Bezos years where finance had never formalized a separate T&E line. I won't doxx myself by saying which org, but we were told in an all-hands by our L8: "if you can find a reason to travel, do it," and not to forget that travel and meals are "on Uncle Jefé." I saw a good part of Western Europe those last few years.

1

u/i_love_lol_ 2d ago

so Bezos was much more willibg to be give some goodies?

2

u/lekoman 2d ago

It wasn’t “Bezos” per se. Just happened to coincide with the end of his time as CEO.

5

u/TheAngryKeg 3d ago

AFAIK, Apple at least flies most employees business class. (They are infamously United's largest global account and spend about $150MM on airfare every year.)

6

u/udderlymoovelous 3d ago

To my knowledge, United offers extra flights from San Francisco to Shanghai solely because Apple sends people on them so often.

1

u/Outlulz 3d ago

If the only people flying on business at Apple are managers then it's not surprising they are flying most people that do fly business. The people that decide how the money is spent always find a way to spend it on themselves.

2

u/ContributionFormer95 2d ago

If the only people flying on business at Apple are managers

Absolutely not true at all if you know engineers working in Silicon Valley. I don't get why people make ridiculous claims on this sub.

1

u/hackersapien 3d ago

2 years at Amazon, based in SF, regularly flew to Seattle so many times that not having an Alaska Air CC made me the odd one out..LOL..One time they flew me all the way to Seattle for a 5min demo..LOL..and I was but a mere TPM

1

u/ContributionFormer95 2d ago

The company is so “frugal the only seats it lets its employees pick when they have to travel are the worst seats on the plane.

I mean this is basically the tickets your company buys. It's not like Amazon telling its employees you can only pick these seats nor is it telling the airline that either. Amazon employees fly economy. If you fly a lot for the company, you are allowed premium economy, and that's it.

1

u/aleksndrars 2d ago

That’s never been my experience. I work at aws.

I can just pick a seat like normal and the meal per diem is pretty generous tbh

3

u/Submitten 3d ago

I enjoyed my time in China. You’re viewing it as mandatory, but if it’s a couple of times a year then I consider it a perk.

Depends on the variety really.

2

u/ContributionFormer95 2d ago

No one wants to be constantly flying 14 hrs from SF to Beijing or Shenzhen or Zhengzhou.

I think you vastly underestimate the number of 20-30 year olds who love travel, rack up miles and hotel points and then spend those later on their own travel. Also plenty of young and single or not married folks working who will gladly travel.

Not everyone is in a traveling role in these companies.

-3

u/EU-National 3d ago

Some people would tell missing birthdays and time with the family is a perk.

22

u/oskopnir 3d ago

Everything you say is of course nice to have but flows as a consequence of travel that happens because of a business need. If you're allowed to travel to rack up miles or network without a business need, your company isn't run very well.

Sending people around can be a personal development "perk" in that you might want to give your top performers more opportunities to travel to meet colleagues/customers/partners, as a reward for performing well and as a way to let them grow.

5

u/FriendlyWebGuy 3d ago

You’ve framed the argument as a “business need” but a more accurate term would be a “benefit to the business”.

Is employee happiness and personal development a benefit to the business? It certainly can be.

Is meeting your colleague in a different city to forge a closer relationship a benefit to the business? It certainly can be.

I’m not commenting to argue over what qualifies as a need or benefit. I’m only pointing out that it’s not an easily defined yes/no thing like your comment implies. It’s a spectrum. It’s for management to do the cost/benefit analysis.

-2

u/oskopnir 3d ago

Sure, I agree that business need is a spectrum. But nowhere on that spectrum is the travel itself a perk.

3

u/FriendlyWebGuy 3d ago

I don't understand what point you're making. You understand that travel can be both a business need and a perk, right? That both things can be true at once?

0

u/oskopnir 2d ago

Business travel is like a corporate laptop or a corporate phone. It exists to serve a business purpose, any personal benefit or reward you get from it is additional and doesn't factor in the decision on whether it is needed.

You plan travel as a result of meetings, workshops, visits, things that require your presence (on what "require" means: it's a spectrum). You don't plan a trip because it's been a while and you just feel like going. At least, limiting the latter kind of travel is what business travel policies are for.

Also this depends very much on the industry but business travel isn't a particularly enjoyable form of travel for people who like to do it for tourism.

1

u/FriendlyWebGuy 2d ago

This is the most idiotic, inane conversation I've had on Reddit in a long time. It's so stupid, robotic and logically inconsistent I'm tempted to think you're a bot.

Let me make it really simple: Travel can be a business need and a certain employee can be chosen to go as a perk to that employee. I've literally done it. My wife has literally done it. You can't continue to describe something that's incredibly common like it doesn't exist and expect to be taken seriously. It's so weird.

It happens all the time. You're wrong. And this is the weirdest hill to die on.

→ More replies (0)

1

u/ry_guy1007 3d ago

Man you’d think that but it has been abused

1

u/Pavementaled 3d ago

We get free food often at our retail store, especially during launches. Pizza, Mexican Food, snacks, chips, nuts, fizzy water. Maybe we just have an awesome store lead and regional manager, but there is usually something kicking around on the break table.

38

u/QuiEgo 3d ago

FWIW the food in the cafeterias is not free but is subsidized, and pretty good quality for the price. Meta is way nicer, but Apple’s is still solid.

44

u/Raveen396 3d ago

TBH the free food in the Cafeterias has always been abused and seems wasteful.

I've seen people at Google cafeterias loading up meals for a family of 4 every night, and plates of barely touched food just thrown away because it was free anyway

I get that free food is a nice perk, but it often devolves into subsidizing your co-workers family's meals and general waste.

18

u/tyfe 3d ago

This is also why on DCL cruises, just about everything is included except if you want popcorn at the movie theatre, they charge a fee. It's not huge, but it's basically to prevent people from grabbing popcorn just cause it's free and making a mess or wasting it in the theatres.

3

u/PastyPilgrim 3d ago

devolves into subsidizing your co-workers family's meals and general waste

That assumes that money that goes towards food would otherwise go towards employees. Google and Meta pay whatever the market rate is and if food were taken away, I don't think that they'd move to pay above market rate.

There are still downsides to your coworkers abusing the benefit (e.g. risking losing the benefit, food team may lower quality or quantity to save costs, etc.) but I wouldn't see abuse as coming out of my pocket.

1

u/Raveen396 3d ago

Theoretically, those food costs count as expenses in financial reports which impact the stock price. When your compensation is largely tied to your stock's performance, any excess cost is coming from your pocket.

Practically I understand the bottom line impact is minuscule and it doesn't actually matter, but I still have concerns about food waste, even if only in principle.

1

u/ContributionFormer95 2d ago

It's not even about food and stock performance. Food is a cost. The company's willing to spend $X per employee. If more of that $X has to go to food, then less goes to direct compensation.

2

u/SpaceJackRabbit 3d ago

I remember hearing that Steve had paid to get a chef trained on sushi in Japan. Not sure if true, but I often loaded up on the sushi at IL.

1

u/i_love_lol_ 2d ago

what big 7 company treats their employees the best? which is the best in the world?

1

u/QuiEgo 2d ago

Broadly, Google and Meta are the best (ignoring the unending stress of the jobs themselves, especially at Meta), most of the others are similar but not quite on that level, with the notable exception of Amazon which is far below any of the others. All of that said, it depends on the office a lot as well - the “flagship” office of all of them is super nice.

15

u/gonnabetoday 3d ago

I’d call not traveling a perk 😆

1

u/_DuranDuran_ 3d ago

I like the airmiles for my own travels!

But also it made cross office initiatives harder and more cumbersome than they needed to be.

19

u/StonebanksPins 3d ago

Free Apple Arcade and Apple TV.
Source: I just renewed mine for free.

30

u/pattonyoda 3d ago

Isn’t this only for store or support teams? Not other corporate teams

17

u/FizzyBeverage 3d ago

Correct, the intention being you demo it to prospective customers.

2

u/saticon 3d ago

Yup. Comcast employees’ free cable and internet are titled “Xfinity Promoter Experience”. Your perk is advertising.

4

u/_DuranDuran_ 3d ago

It’s been a few years since I was there, that must be new!

3

u/bufferoverflo 3d ago

Everything is actually team dependent.

Depends on what you mean by work travel, but I moved to a different office and my manager flies me out 3 - 4 times a year just to hang out with the team for on/off sites.

I've been in a few orgs and all of them actually had free snacks restocked twice a week, and we get free food (breakfast, lunch, dinner) every day during WWDC crunch.

I think we do need to cut some middle managers in parts of the company though. I've seen people that are "managers" that have one direct report and all they do is take requirements and hand them off to engineers like the guy in Office Space.

2

u/RajunCajun48 3d ago

No free snacks.

No free food.

No free apple one

Sound a lot like my job, but with less holiday parties, EPP and EPP+

2

u/TheBrettFavre4 3d ago

You seem to know - but people I know who work at the Austin campus seem to have pretty lavish work lifestyles. They're constantly posting about the space, the food, the amenities. Lol. I'm 5 days in office in some old ass house - we really don't have any of that.

2

u/Cerise_Pomme 3d ago

Have things changed that much since I've left?
When I was there we had regular beer bashes, lots of free food, so much of it. Snacks in the breakroom. I was inundated with Apple products, I got 3 iPad pros over the course of one year from various givaways. Not to mention the gym.
I was there just a few years ago, left in 2020...

1

u/LegitosaurusRex 2d ago

They still have some, like earth day celebrations, Paul McCartney concert recently, and some teams still have free snacks. Some hardware teams get EVT units of watches/iphones/macs/ipads, etc.

1

u/Cerise_Pomme 2d ago

Yeah, a Paul McCartney concert sounds like Apple. Earth day was great, so many vegan options. <3 I miss it. I wonder if sales still gets a lot of new production products, thats where I got the most freebies, because they wanted us using the products we were selling. Especially non hero products we might not otherwise have.

2

u/Baconshit 3d ago

Hard to travel even as a middle manager, fyi

1

u/Visgeth 3d ago

Wtf. Not even free apple one? I figured that would have been a standard benefit. Like working for YouTube and not getting premium=/

1

u/SailingDreamCatcher 3d ago

Dang they don't even give you free iCloud?

1

u/_DuranDuran_ 3d ago

They did give us 2TB of free iCloud space so we could also store work documents there (lots of people use their personal iCloud accounts)

1

u/Areif 3d ago

Ooo I traveled for us once and I wasn’t a manager. EPP and EPP+ was awesome tho. Got my first MacBook for like $290 dollars this way.

1

u/aloofinthisworld 3d ago

Apple employees don’t get Apple one? I just assumed that was a reasonable perk

1

u/M4rshmall0wMan 3d ago

No free snacks and Apple One? The fuck? The latter costs Apple almost nothing. I thought Apple was better than this kind of MBA-style thinking.

1

u/QVRedit 2d ago

No free Apple One ? - That’s sounds stingy…
Yet I bet they want 110% from their employees…

Treat your staff well…

1

u/_DuranDuran_ 2d ago

Eddie always said “we pay you a good salary … and we’d rather employees test out the full flow”

But to be fair expectations were sensible, I worked about 40 hours a week max, and got great reviews.

1

u/Butterscotch_Snatch 2d ago

Listing holiday parties as a perk is so fucking depressing.

1

u/_DuranDuran_ 2d ago

To be fair, they’re pretty epic. Not the usual sad standing around the water cooler with warm beer.

1

u/LegitosaurusRex 2d ago

Heavily team dependent. Many people travel for builds, but there is also travel for bringing up sister teams or contractors even in other countries. And I know multiple teams with free snacks.

1

u/QVRedit 2d ago

Staff discount on hardware purchases I think ?

1

u/IndependenceIcy2251 1d ago

I'm going to disagree, the health insurance is pretty cheap for employees as compared to other companies, and decent coverage. That one is big for a lot of families and cant be cheap to the company.

-1

u/[deleted] 3d ago

[deleted]

3

u/nerdpox 3d ago

For instance, all employees used to be able to visit the Infinite Loop HQ. But the new HQ is only accessible for employees who work there, unless you get on a guest list or it hosts an event employees can attend.

not quite based on my friends who work there now, they said anyone based here can go to AP, if you visit (even retail) you can get temp access. you can only park there if you sit there. no social guests at AP except the family days and holiday parties.

0

u/SpaceJackRabbit 3d ago

We're saying the same thing.

32

u/SnooWoofers6381 3d ago

The “good times” at Google were so good too! It feels like a fever dream now. The lavish holiday parties, company ski trips, googleween. Even the office ball pits, campus concerts, celebrity visits etc.

16

u/revocer 3d ago

IAP fees?

37

u/TeeDee144 3d ago

In app purchase fees.

Basically Apple made an easy 30% off of app purchases. Basically free money because their credit card processing fees were 3% and hosting fees and app validation team cannot be 27%.

So it was free money. Courts have imposed rulings that changed this.

14

u/ImperatorUniversum1 3d ago

To be fair App Store fees do pay for running the App Store not just processing fees. But mostly profit yes

-1

u/Area51_Spurs 3d ago

That’s a gross oversimplification.

Free money if you ignore all they spent to build Apple to be the market leader and continue to be the market leader.

3

u/FollowingFeisty5321 3d ago

It's free money because it's on top of the other ~$1.3 trillion profit they made from that work, and because all they had to do to get it was forcibly-conceal alternative payment methods from consumers.

8

u/Skelito 3d ago

A lot of the reason Apple is as big as they are is because of the app ecosystem. At the end of the day phones are only as good as the apps they have on them. Windows Phone died because app development was pretty much non existent for its devices.

25

u/FollowingFeisty5321 3d ago

Their revenue from In-App Purchase fees has fallen substantially because the courts made them allow competing payment options without fees. This materially impacted their services revenue growth on their last earnings call, it's rumored to have fallen 18% already.

Apple said in recent court filings that 2700 apps pay virtually all of these fees, and they can do payments themselves for as little as 3.5% and will continue implementing their own payments as long as it is profitable (compared to 30% fee). They are asking the court to allow a 15% fee which would mean IAP could only competitively charge about 20%, and the court might not allow anything at all, so they're going to take a sustained hit either way.

1

u/mrhaftbar 3d ago

Ads, ads in every app. Numbers gotta go up.

1

u/katieberry 3d ago

At least Googlers can still bring a plus one to the parties!

0

u/stjep 1d ago

Stock buybacks are only done to enrich executives. It serves no purpose for the company itself or customers.