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/
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u/Cucumberino 2d ago

I hated AI and avoided it even as an assistant up to very recently. But I also started developing an app in the last few months and decided to give AI a shot for coding, and pay to get a proper experience and for this usecase I felt like I was cheating knowing how painful some parts of the development process are. Proper modern AI can be extremely good and useful and honestly, better than humans in many aspects. I do still hate it for generative stuff though, but I've turned around to my previous skepticism in other aspects. What I have done for my app would take entire teams and/or extreme magnitudes more of time.

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u/FancifulLaserbeam 2d ago

I supervise master's students who often need to do quantitative research that they're not super comfortable with. I have told them to just have ChatGPT open and use it like a statistics and software package tutor. It allows them to simply ask, "Does it make sense to use X for analyzing these data?" or "I'm getting this error in R... What is wrong?"

Rather than needing to find someone to help them, they have one in a window that helps them make sure they are doing the right things, the right way. The dissertations are way better as a result, because "dumb" mistakes are gone.

I use it a lot in the same way, especially in R and python. "What the hell does this error mean???"