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Hey everyone,
Apple almost never does layoffs. It's one of the only Big Tech companies that mostly sat out the two-year layoff spiral that's hit everyone else. That changed this week: about 200 people got cut from the Siri and Vision Pro teams, and it's landing exactly one week before John Ternus takes over as CEO.
This week we're getting into why the timing isn't a coincidence, plus a data point buried in the same news cycle that might matter more to your job search than the Apple story itself.
New York City
Silicon Valley
394,000 tech workers
~375,000 tech workers
Now the #1 US tech job market
Just dropped to #2
Avg. new-grad SWE pay
$161K in NYC
What we're reading
New York just overtook Silicon Valley as the largest tech job market in the US, per a CBRE report cited by Fortune: 394,000 tech workers in the NYC metro versus roughly 375,000 in the Bay Area, driven by Wall Street's AI hiring and a steady drip of Silicon Valley layoffs.
Hugging Face is reportedly exploring a sale that could value it at $13 billion or more. Yes, the same Hugging Face that got breached by an OpenAI model a few weeks ago.
The 2026 layoffs tracker passed 205,000 tech workers across 322 events as of this week, already blowing past all of 2025. That's roughly 883 job losses a day this year.
Apple Cut 200 Jobs. NYC Just Took the Crown.
Cleaning house before the new boss shows up.
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Bloomberg reported the specifics: Apple shut down its Vision Pro games team entirely, pared down a group that made 3D immersive video, and cut a chunk of the team working on Siri. That last one stings a little, since Siri has spent two years visibly losing to ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, and Google is now stepping in to help Apple rebuild it. Apple's statement to Bloomberg was short: the company is realigning teams to evolve the business, and that "will also impact a limited number of existing roles."
The numbers:
Employees cut at Apple
~200
Days until the new CEO starts
~7
Apple's last disclosed headcount
166,000
Tech layoffs so far in 2026
205,000+
The cuts are tiny against a company that size. What's not tiny is the timing. Tim Cook is stepping aside and John Ternus takes over as CEO in just about a week. Doing the unpleasant work right before a handoff, so the new boss starts with a clean slate instead of inheriting the decision, is a pattern you'll see again if you pay attention to leadership transitions once you're actually inside a company.
Will also impact a limited number of existing roles.
What got cut, and what it tells you:
Team | What happened |
|---|---|
Vision Pro games | Shut down entirely |
3D immersive video | Pared down, not eliminated |
Siri | Cut as Google steps in to help rebuild the product |
What this actually means for you:
Stop defaulting to "move to the Bay Area." New York now has more tech workers than Silicon Valley, and new-grad software engineer pay in NYC is averaging $161,396 this year, per ZipRecruiter. Firms actually hiring new grads in the city right now include Hudson River Trading, Palantir, Bloomberg, and fintech shops like Zip and Uniswap Labs. If you've only been filtering job boards by SF and Seattle, add NYC today.
"Big, stable company" stopped meaning "safe" this week. Apple was the one name everyone assumed was immune. It wasn't. Before you accept an offer anywhere, look up whether that specific team shipped something that made money in the last year, not just whether the company logo is famous.
If you're interviewing at a company doing any kind of reorg, ask directly which teams got cut and why. A team that got fully shut down (like Apple's Vision Pro games group) was a bet that failed. A team that got trimmed but kept (like Siri) is still considered worth investing in. That's the difference between joining a team on its way out and one that's about to get more resources.
There's a thread running under the Siri story worth pulling on: a lot of why Siri fell behind wasn't a talent problem, it was a data problem. Siri never had one clean, connected view of what you were doing across Apple's own apps and services. Competitors built their AI features on top of a single unified pipeline from day one. That gap, between having the data somewhere and actually being able to use it, is the same gap that quietly kills side projects and small client work long before anyone notices the product itself is fine.
This week's sponsor, HubSpot, is built around closing exactly that gap. Their Agentic Customer Platform pulls your data, your team, and your tools into one connected system instead of five disconnected ones, with AI built in rather than bolted on afterward, so the kind of personalized experience Siri struggled to deliver at Apple's scale is something you can actually pull off at yours. If you're running a freelance client base or a side project that's starting to outgrow a spreadsheet, that's the exact problem it's solving.
Ternus takes over in a little over a week. Whatever he decides to build next, the team he inherits is smaller and leaner than the one Cook had a month ago. That's usually how it goes right before a handoff, and it's worth remembering the next time you're the one starting a new job under a new boss.
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