Apple Inc, facing a resurgence in COVID-19 cases and the fast-spreading Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2, is delaying its corporate return-to-office deadline from Feb. 1 next year to a “date yet to be determined.”
Employees were informed of the move via a memo sent by Apple chief executive officer Tim Cook on Wednesday.
An Apple spokesman confirmed the decision to Bloomberg News.
Photo: EPA-EFE
The delay comes just weeks after the company asked employees to begin returning by February, a timeline that had already been pushed back several times.
The lack of a firm date shows the struggle that companies face in trying to get their operations back to normal.
Fellow tech giant Microsoft Corp scrapped its return-to-work date in September.
“We are delaying the start of our hybrid work pilot to a date yet to be determined,” Cook said in the memo. “Our offices remain open and many of our colleagues are coming in regularly, including our teams in Greater China and elsewhere.”
The decision had been made based on “rising cases in many parts of the world and the emergence of a new strain of the virus,” he said.
Cook also strongly encouraged employees to receive COVID-19 vaccinations and booster shots, saying that “this is by far the best way to keep you and your community safe.”
Apple had previously delayed its office-return plans from June, September, October and January. The latest decision comes as the company restored its mask mandate to all US retail stores and temporarily shut three locations because of rising virus cases among employees.
In the memo, Cook also said the Cupertino, California-based company would provide each employee a US$1,000 bonus that might be used for work-from-home needs, saying that it is “in support of our commitment to a more flexible environment.”
That includes retail workers, he added.
“These funds are intended to help you with your home workspace and can be used as you see fit. You will be receiving more information about this shortly,” he said.
When Apple’s staff eventually returns to the office, they would be expected to work in-person on Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. They would be allowed to work from home on Wednesdays and Fridays depending on their team. The company is also offering an additional one month of work-from-home time.
Apple workers would get at least four weeks notice before a new back-to-the-office deadline takes effect, Cook said.
“As we look forward to more of our teams being together again, we will continue to make decisions based on local conditions,” he said.
GROWING OWINGS: While Luxembourg and China swapped the top three spots, the US continued to be the largest exposure for Taiwan for the 41st consecutive quarter The US remained the largest debtor nation to Taiwan’s banking sector for the 41st consecutive quarter at the end of September, after local banks’ exposure to the US market rose more than 2 percent from three months earlier, the central bank said. Exposure to the US increased to US$198.896 billion, up US$4.026 billion, or 2.07 percent, from US$194.87 billion in the previous quarter, data released by the central bank showed on Friday. Of the increase, about US$1.4 billion came from banks’ investments in securitized products and interbank loans in the US, while another US$2.6 billion stemmed from trust assets, including mutual funds,
AI TALENT: No financial details were released about the deal, in which top Groq executives, including its CEO, would join Nvidia to help advance the technology Nvidia Corp has agreed to a licensing deal with artificial intelligence (AI) start-up Groq, furthering its investments in companies connected to the AI boom and gaining the right to add a new type of technology to its products. The world’s largest publicly traded company has paid for the right to use Groq’s technology and is to integrate its chip design into future products. Some of the start-up’s executives are leaving to join Nvidia to help with that effort, the companies said. Groq would continue as an independent company with a new chief executive, it said on Wednesday in a post on its Web
JOINT EFFORTS: MediaTek would partner with Denso to develop custom chips to support the car-part specialist company’s driver-assist systems in an expanding market MediaTek Inc (聯發科), the world’s largest mobile phone chip designer, yesterday said it is working closely with Japan’s Denso Corp to build a custom automotive system-on-chip (SoC) solution tailored for advanced driver-assistance systems and cockpit systems, adding another customer to its new application-specific IC (ASIC) business. This effort merges Denso’s automotive-grade safety expertise and deep vehicle integration with MediaTek’s technologies cultivated through the development of Media- Tek’s Dimensity AX, leveraging efficient, high-performance SoCs and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to offer a scalable, production-ready platform for next-generation driver assistance, the company said in a statement yesterday. “Through this collaboration, we are bringing two
Even as the US is embarked on a bitter rivalry with China over the deployment of artificial intelligence (AI), Chinese technology is quietly making inroads into the US market. Despite considerable geopolitical tensions, Chinese open-source AI models are winning over a growing number of programmers and companies in the US. These are different from the closed generative AI models that have become household names — ChatGPT-maker OpenAI or Google’s Gemini — whose inner workings are fiercely protected. In contrast, “open” models offered by many Chinese rivals, from Alibaba (阿里巴巴) to DeepSeek (深度求索), allow programmers to customize parts of the software to suit their
RSS