Tim Cook Offers Work From Home to Most Apple Staff Amid Coronavirus Concerns
Apple CEO Tim Cook has today offered employees at most of its global offices the ability to work from home, and announced new policies in light of the coronavirus outbreak.
Image via David Paul Morris/Bloomberg
Employees at several global offices have been told to "feel free to work remotely if your job allows,” for the week of March 9 to 13, according to an internal memo that was obtained by Bloomberg and later confirmed by an Apple spokesman.
This extends the company’s policy from Friday, which encouraged employees in California and Seattle to work remotely, to almost all of Apple's corporate locations in South Korea, Japan, Italy, Germany, France, Switzerland, and the U.K.
In addition to this, Apple is now implementing new efforts to expand deep cleaning procedures and maximize interpersonal space. Fewer places will be available at Today at Apple sessions and the Genius Bar to reduce human density in Apple stores.
On the corporate side, Apple is rolling out managerial changes to prevent the spread of coronavirus for employees who still have to come in due to the demands of their work.
In line with other major tech companies, Apple has guaranteed that it will continue to pay hourly contract workers their normal wages globally.
Apple has been significantly impacted by the coronavirus given its global presence and supply chain based in China, resulting in major stock price fluctuation. There have been reports of iPhone shortages and analysts predict that the upcoming 5G iPhone may now be delayed.
Popular Stories
Apple has announced it will be holding a special event on Tuesday, May 7 at 7 a.m. Pacific Time (10 a.m. Eastern Time), with a live stream to be available on Apple.com and on YouTube as usual. The event invitation has a tagline of "Let Loose" and shows an artistic render of an Apple Pencil, suggesting that iPads will be a focus of the event. Subscribe to the MacRumors YouTube channel for more ...
Apple has dropped the number of Vision Pro units that it plans to ship in 2024, going from an expected 700 to 800k units to just 400k to 450k units, according to Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. Orders have been scaled back before the Vision Pro has launched in markets outside of the United States, which Kuo says is a sign that demand in the U.S. has "fallen sharply beyond expectations." As a...
Apple today released several open source large language models (LLMs) that are designed to run on-device rather than through cloud servers. Called OpenELM (Open-source Efficient Language Models), the LLMs are available on the Hugging Face Hub, a community for sharing AI code. As outlined in a white paper [PDF], there are eight total OpenELM models, four of which were pre-trained using the...
Apple is finally planning a Calculator app for the iPad, over 14 years after launching the device, according to a source familiar with the matter. iPadOS 18 will include a built-in Calculator app for all iPad models that are compatible with the software update, which is expected to be unveiled during the opening keynote of Apple's annual developers conference WWDC on June 10. AppleInsider...
The upcoming iOS 17.5 update for the iPhone includes only a few new user-facing features, but hidden code changes reveal some additional possibilities. Below, we have recapped everything new in the iOS 17.5 and iPadOS 17.5 beta so far. Web Distribution Starting with the second beta of iOS 17.5, eligible developers are able to distribute their iOS apps to iPhone users located in the EU...
Top Rated Comments
By being able to work from home I can take a more relaxed breakfast as I don't have to get dressed up and commute and also start to work earlier which means I can stop working earlier too, leaving me with more free time to spend on my hobbies which leads to less stress.
Working from home all the time is not good for mental health though as you do need to get out and talk to people from time to time. But it's important to have the option. Apple is offering what should be a standard way to work in an office environment.
It’s too bad that people go to work despite being sick because they don’t have sick hours available and have to make money. Oh the world we live in.
Not to mention environmental benefit, all the traffic and omissions you save by people not having to daily commute. As well as less oil dependency from other countries.
Skype your business meetings.
In any event, in each of the four Silicon Valley companies I’ve worked at, the “it’s ok to work at home if need be” policy has always been based on the employee determining whether he or she can get his or her work done. After all, if so, why force them to come in?
sorry you are employed at a less rationally-run business.