Big Tech Is Slashing Jobs. Why Apple Is the Exception

Even as its peers slash roles and redirect funds to other aspects of their business, Apple has largely sidestepped the wave of layoff announcements sweeping the rest of the tech sector and troubling America's white-collar workers.

Over the past few years, tech has become especially vulnerable to mass layoff, leading in private-sector job cuts in 2025, according to the outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, and accounting for 154,445 of the 1.2 million announcements made last year. And 2026 has seen an acceleration of this trend, with the 52,050 cuts announced in the first quarter marking a 40-percent increase over the same period in 2025.

Much of this has been concentrated among America's most prominent tech conglomerates, with the Magnificent Seven giants Meta and Microsoft last month confirming that they would be moving forward with significant headcount reductions, and others like Oracle and Amazon slashing roles on a similar scale.

But while many of these firms pursue five-digit job cuts, official layoff notices reveal Apple has been far more hesitant in trimming its workforce. The company has even committed to a sizeable headcount expansion-announcing in early 2025 that it planned to hire around 20,000 people over the next four years.

Experts who spoke with Newsweek said that the disparity between the iPhone maker and its peers can be in part explained by the company's cautious approach to hiring and investments under the leadership of outgoing CEO Tim Cook.

Newsweek has contacted Apple for comment.

Apple's Cautious COVID Hiring

The coronavirus pandemic significantly increased demand for digital services, as remote work, e-commerce and video streaming became everyday essentials for households and businesses in the U.S. and worldwide.

Some industry leaders saw this as a permanent transformation, with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella declaring in early 2021 that the world was witnessing "the dawn of a second wave of digital transformation sweeping every company and every industry."

Racing to keep up with what was viewed as the new era of digital demand, much of the tech sector entered an aggressive period of hiring and spending-buoyed by near-record-low interest rates-with companies rapidly increasing headcounts to defend market share amid the "digital transformation."

An analysis by CNBC in 2023 found that firms like Microsoft and Meta expanded significantly over this period, growing their workforce by more than 10 percent across multiple years-the latter increasing its headcount by 30 percent in 2020 alone.

Apple, meanwhile, hired "judiciously” during the boom, with year-over-year workforce growth of 7.3 percent in 2020, 4.8 percent in 2021 and 6.5 percent in 2022.

This rapid expansion by other tech firms is now being cited as a reason tech companies-barring Apple-are engaged in mass layoffs, viewed by some as a correction to pre-pandemic trends rather than a structural shift.

"They all overhired during COVID," venture capitalist and Meta board member Marc Andreessen said on a recent podcast, when asked to diagnose the sector’s recent job cuts. "The hiring binge companies went on during COVID was just wild."

AI and the Investment Trade-Off

Andreessen said that these firms, when announcing large-scale cuts, can now rely on the "silver bullet excuse" of artificial intelligence, and many of the companies cutting roles have often cited the technology while doing so.

Meta pointed to the need to invest in other areas of its business in a memo sent to employees last month. That came after CEO Mark Zuckerberg told analysts in January that AI tools meant "projects that used to require big teams [can] now be accomplished by a single very talented person.”

Separately, Amazon cited the "transformative" potential of AI and the need to operate "more leanly" when revealing in October that it would be reducing its corporate workforce by around 14,000 roles.

Independent tech analyst Benedict Evans told Newsweek that one could also observe a clear overlap between the tech giants engaged in mass layoffs and those that are ramping up capital expenditures on their respective AI build-outs-data centers, chips and networking infrastructure, among other things-a pattern Apple has, again, largely avoided.

"The other companies over-hired around digital advertising in the pandemic and have been cutting back in general and to free up cash for AI CapEx [capital expenditure]," he said. "Apple did not over-hire and is not doing AI CapEx."

Apple's rivals have devoted increasingly significant sums toward their AI investments. In April, Microsoft projected spending around $190 billion this year-up from $88 billion in 2025-driven in part by investments in Azure AI, OpenAI infrastructure and data center expansion.

In reporting its first-quarter results last week, Meta raised its full-year capital expenditure guidance to between $125 billion and $145 billion, up from $115 billion to $135 billion, and told investors this was a result of "higher component pricing" as well as "additional data center costs to support future-year capacity."

Apple, meanwhile, has not participated in this investment surge to nearly the same degree, reporting just $4.3 billion in CapEx for the first half of its fiscal year, which ended March 28.

The company’s slower entry into the AI race has drawn criticism from some, including prominent investors like Ross Gerber, who in January warned that Apple had “completely missed the AI boat” under Cook’s leadership. But some experts believe this cautious approach has helped to stave off the large-scale job cuts its rivals have been driven toward as they grapple with the cost implications of their AI strategy.

"The large tech firms are investing extraordinary amounts of money in AI and data centers so they need to keep a firm hand on business costs, including personnel," said Darrell West, senior fellow at the Center for Technology Innovation at the Brookings Institution's Governance Studies program.

West told Newsweek that Apple has been "quieter on this front" while keeping AI-related overheads low by licensing the tech from other firms like OpenAI and Google-avoiding building and running data centers of its own "which helps keep its investment costs down and avoid huge layoffs."

"Apple has always been different, seemingly on its own pace," said Mark Muro, a senior fellow with Brookings' Metropolitan Policy Program.

"In keeping with that, it's simply not been in the forefront of the AI explosion, and that has left its pathway over the last five years a bit less tumultuous," he told Newsweek. "The question now is whether that lack of tumult leaves it without a truly compelling path forward in the AI period."

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This story was originally published May 6, 2026 at 5:00 AM.