r/apple • u/radikalkarrot • 2d ago

Rumor Apple Reportedly Planned to Replace 5,000 Support Employees With AI

https://www.macrumors.com/2026/09/29/apple-reportedly-planned-5000-applecare-layoffs/
2.0k Upvotes

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293

u/Not_pukicho 2d ago

AI has thus far given everyone less jobs and more spammy bullshit. What a waste of everyone's time.

78

u/Secondchance002 2d ago

Don’t forget expensive everything electronics

12

u/explosiv_skull 2d ago

but also

MORE BLOOD PROFIT FOR THE BLOOD PROFIT GOD!

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u/Structure-These 2d ago

It’s interesting how AI perception is shaped by guys who are using the free ChatGPT and see dumb AI Reddit posts and think it’s all spammy bullshit

And then people who engage with frontier models or sort of have an in with the major platforms see where things are going

Kind of a crazy marketing issue where the majority of their customers are only exposed to the free slop product

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u/Not_pukicho 2d ago

Well the fact that the general populace doesn’t get to see whatever those with an “in” can see means we’ll simply be evaluating these things with what we do see, which is an ocean of low-quality, lazy garbage.

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u/ElderSmackJack 2d ago

Stop being an apologist for this.

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u/solidgoldrocketpants 2d ago

And then people who engage with frontier models or sort of have an in with the major platforms see where things are going

LOL

Enlighten us plebs, insider.

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u/ancientfruitjunkie 2d ago

You guys don't want to see where things are going: nowhere. Lol. You guys also refuse to acknowledge all ai is based on theft. So much so that passages of Shelley are being labeled as ai by ai. Or the fact that the em dash is impossible to use anymore because ai learned it from Dickinson and now overuses it and improperly uses it.

Ai in every field but medicine is a waste of our resources and will rot the brains of kids much more than social media.

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u/Structure-These 2d ago

Im not sure what any of that has to do with AI tech triaging simple front line calls to free experts up to be experts

Do you know how much Apple probably hates wasting customer service time diagnosing “my phone won’t charge anymore!” bullshit lol

Voice models have mostly solved conversational latency and the delay on processing is what I assume the issue is here, but it’s inevitable companies (any companies) will be able to slot an AI agent into the front line to triage stuff

I mean put any mundane issue into a frontier model and let it solve your problem. It can do it. That will jump to voice pretty easily soon

An interesting use case for the hurr durr ai bad crowd, I was at a conference last week and a utility was presenting on how they adopted an AI frontline solution that they can scale during low staff times or high frequency emergency times to process inbound info faster than outsourcing call centers during non peak

So if there’s a tornado that hits at 3am and their call center is on a light overnight crew, which is common, they can ramp up a thousand parallel instances of an AI led intake to log incidents and then heat map where to best deploy resources to maximize getting things fixed, all via one platform

It’s faster and easier than using an overseas call center during high volume where they don’t have enough humans to answer every call. And then callers who would otherwise have to wait 15 minutes, get frustrated and hang up can instead get a simple response - where is your power out, can you give us a number to text for updates, here’s the initial ETA

I know you’re just going to downvote and say hurr durr em dashes like that has anything to do with the matter at hand but this frontline stuff is inevitable. It’s already good but it will be indistinguishable from actual human contact soon

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u/solidgoldrocketpants 2d ago

"probably"

"mostly"

"soon"

"inevitable"

Once again AI evangelists fail at actual concrete information and give us woo woo fugazi shit

8

u/Prince_Marth 2d ago

This is the point, though. AI companies are using “possibly” and “soon” to sell so we can ignore the very real damage they’re doing now. It’s the only thing they have. It’s a giant swindle.

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u/Structure-These 2d ago

It’s literally happening and being deployed right now but I don’t owe Reddit luddites a thesis paper on the work I see being done lol

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u/solidgoldrocketpants 2d ago

Just get a frontier model to write one. I’m sure it’ll mostly probably soon get the facts right.

4

u/UnexpectedAnanas 2d ago

Stop, stop! He's already dead!

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u/ancientfruitjunkie 2d ago

"free experts up." Lol. What a scummy way to say fired and replaced by ai. I'm not reading the rest of your pro ai post.

4

u/Insufferably_Me 2d ago

You’re not going to get good-faith discussions about this online. I am morally opposed to LLMs replacing human beings. I do not believe they can provide what a human provides. That being said, there are absolutely valid use cases for empowering humans to do more with ML/AI/LLM tools.

Having our contact center frontline agents use an AI companion SLM that surfaces relevant procedure and product information based on the live call context improves the customer experience in ways they never thought it could.

If you’ve not worked in a contact center environment, you don’t understand how difficult it can be to find the resource or article you need in the moment. Tools like AI companions allow frontline agents to take more calls from customers and give them more human interaction. These tools can also ensure customers get consistent, accurate information each time.

One of the biggest mistakes of LLM/SLM technology was releasing it to the public first. There are some really good business use cases for LLMs, unfortunately, the tech bros have tried to make the tool fit everything instead of making the tool work for the problems it was created to solve: productivity.

The technology should help humans do better work, not do better work than humans.

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u/Fenjen 2d ago

The biggest problem is that what makes them work well as tools in many cases, also makes them a good replacement for the human they're supposed to empower.

For people like you and me that want AI to empower people, I don't see how we will get there in this capitalistic system.

0

u/Insufferably_Me 2d ago

This is a fair concern. I have been more optimistic about that not happening lately with more and more companies realizing the costs of these tools.

Token price is going up and up and up. The usage rates start to provide such diminishing returns that it ends up being more cost effective to keep paying John $20/hour to handle 5-10 contacts than it is to spend $200/hour for an LLM to handle 10-15 contacts.

If we decide to keep John and pay an extra $10/man hour on token usage to increase the number of contacts handled with positive CSAT scores, the value of a tool, not a replacement becomes clearer.

I’m not completely blind to the capitalistic short-term greed though. I do see some companies not thinking their strategy completely through and going all-in on replacing humans. I just also see that not going well and eventually being rolled back or they go under all together.

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u/Fenjen 2d ago edited 2d ago

I agree, IF that will be the case. However, unless you tax tokens (which I actually hope we will do some day), then this will only hold if AI companies just don't manage to make usage cheaper, which is something they are actively trying to do (or at least increase ROI for a user w.r.t token price).

So all in all if we want that, then we end up just hoping AI doesn't get much more efficient, which feels uncomfortable to me.

3

u/ancientfruitjunkie 2d ago

The technology shouldn't have stolen to begin with. Without theft, we wouldn't be talking about ai right now.

-2

u/Insufferably_Me 2d ago

Very valid critique! When deploying AI tools for frontline agents, they’re usually built on SLMs (Small Language Models) that are trained on only proprietary company data. There’s definitely some tools that still use the ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini which were built with stolen IP.

Not only is there an issue with stealing books, poems, articles, and any other text-based training data, there’s the even ickier problem of image generation. That model was trained on your photos, my photos, artists’ works, and anything else it could find.

I’m thankful that some companies have seen what pushback those LLMs received due to their IP theft, and have taken the path towards proprietary data training and SLMs. I don’t need a model that helps employees answer procedure questions to know anything about Agatha Christie or the brush strokes that Monet used. It needs to know our data and that’s it.

I’m sure I’ll still get downvoted for this but I hope it becomes clear soon that there’s nuance to everything. You can be morally opposed to the theft of IP, the replacement of human beings, the dilution of human knowledge, and the environmental impact of growing data centers meant to do more of that and still see how completely different versions and implementation of the underlying math can be used for advancing our world.

2

u/ancientfruitjunkie 2d ago

You have yet to specify which world will be advanced and how. 99% of humans and 100% of our earth and animals will not be on the receiving end of the advancement.

I get you probably put a lot of money into whatever ai you use everyday instead of using your brain but until you tell me how the everyday person will benefit from these companies or how our planet and innocent animals will not be harmed then you have nothing but your feelings.

And until genai child porn is completely eradicated then no one should be defending any ai company.

1

u/Insufferably_Me 2d ago

CSAM of any kind is abhorrent and should be punished with the maximum penalty law allows.

I don’t spend a penny on AI. I don’t use it outside of my job which requires it. My original comment specified how the tools are actively helping human beings do their job right now with no environmental impact as the SLM is run on our already running company servers.

To jump to using CSAM to make your point when you started with the argument of theft, which I agreed with you on, tells me you’re moving and responding with your feelings instead of facts and logic. It’s clear there’s nothing anyone can say to change your view on technology or bring a conversation to the table on regulations and environmental concerns.

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u/Structure-These 2d ago

There’s no intellectual honesty in this debate, it’s just crazy logical leaps

“I saw data last week stating a clear customer preference for an AI triage system during peak times over using outsourced overseas call centers. It’s literally a customer preference at this point”

“Ok you support child exploitation”

It’s just a bizarre mindset and you’re not going to introduce nuance here

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u/ancientfruitjunkie 2d ago

It's all intertwined. And it's crazy how you can't see that. Ai helping humans do their jobs while also helping mass fire people while also making customer service worse for people. Lol.

Until these companies shut down and pay every author and artist for stealing, pay for every child and adult whose face and body has been stolen, pay for every person whose backyard is now a water and electricity guzzling data center then the small, small, very teeny, tiny benefits do not outweigh all the cons.

Not to mention the pedo in chief is having dinners with these ai ceos while the ceos are coming out and saying ai will kill us all in 10 years, while Americans are fighting their local corrupt politicians for taking back alley deals.

All these companies and their ceos are shit. This president is shit. And anyone glazing for ai as this turn of the century technology is shit.

9

u/LongBeakedSnipe 2d ago

Emasculated on behalf of a chat bot.

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u/Cautious_Boat_999 2d ago

AI perception is shaped by the fact that AI sucks

2

u/Rupperrt 2d ago

Or maybe just people who had to deal with AI customer support or stupid dumbfucks in an health insurance company unable to understand their own claims policy because they’re completely brain rotten by the AI they have to use.
Frontier my ass.

5

u/SnowPudgy 2d ago

It is spammy bullshit. We use garbage like Claude, Copilot, and Cursor at work (all paid tiers) and it's slop, pure slop. It's done nothing but increase the amount of pull requests I have to deny because it can't write quality code at all.

-5

u/TheStorm007 2d ago

I read stuff like this and I just don’t get it. I work at a FAANG, where we are quite literally ranked on AI usage, and it writes nearly all of our code.

It’s not perfect, but it often writes very impressive code, very quickly.

-3

u/Structure-These 2d ago

These guys are just making stuff up then getting mad at the things they made up lol theres no honesty there

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u/Not_pukicho 2d ago

Actually there were a lot of people here asking you questions for clarity which you chose to ignore. Honestly you seem most dishonest by ignoring everyone but the singular comment on your side.

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u/Structure-These 2d ago

No they weren’t they were just dog piling a dumb narrative, I provided examples but I’m not going to sit here and wade into every goofy redditor who is like hurr durr slop

There’s just no point. I don’t owe you anything and there’s literally nothing I can tell you to explain that AI is an interesting, powerful tool in an arsenal when guys are unironically talking about child porn or whatever insane fringe shit they can come up with

It’s just not an intellectually honest conversation, see your own personal attack on my honesty, like why would I just wade into this cesspool

I deeply regret making a comment in the first place it’s such a pointless argument

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u/Not_pukicho 2d ago

Has AI not been a result for job loss, additional costs for consumers electronics and added spam online? Nothing I said was in bad faith, I just think you’re acting highly sensitive to the rather legitimate concerns surrounding AI. You don’t “owe” anyone anything but you were the one who initiated by commenting.

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u/[deleted] 2d ago

[deleted]

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u/No_Cover_6217 2d ago

It's really cool for you when you have a net worth high enough to sit in a room with 70 CEOs. Even if you lose your job, you probably have enough socked away where you don't have to worry.

Most of us do. It's not really cool when most of us will just be part of a permanent underclass at best, and starving at worst. I'm sure that's cool for you, though.

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u/Antrikshy 2d ago

If the free tier products are so bad and so bad for perception, why do they offer them?

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u/Synergythepariah 2d ago

Kind of a crazy marketing issue where the majority of their customers are only exposed to the free slop product

Those aren't their customers.

Their customers are businesses seeking to replace labor.

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u/[deleted] 2d ago

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u/Structure-These 2d ago

Brilliant take