Even as some of tech’s biggest companies cut staff, Apple has yet to announce any significant layoffs. But why?

According to The Wall Street Journal, the answer is simple: Apple CEO Tim Cook refused to emulate other companies’ rampant hiring sprees. “From its fiscal year-end in September 2019 to September 2022, Apple’s workforce grew by about 20 percent to approximately 164,000 full-time employees,” the newspaper calculated.

It was a different story at tech giants like Microsoft, where employee headcount rose 53 percent over the same period, or Google, where headcount grew 57 percent. At Meta (formerly Facebook), the number of employees nearly doubled during a two-year period. 

Apple is also notable for offering fewer perks to its employees (for example, you need to pay for lunch at the Apple Park campus, versus the free food offered at Google), although such spending is probably a minor part of the equation when it comes to something like mass layoffs.

“While future Apple layoffs can’t be ruled out… the company may reduce headcount through attrition, rather than firings: simply not replacing people who leave the company,” 9to5Mac suggested.

Among the top tech companies, the layoffs have proven significant. Alphabet, the parent company of Google, plans on laying off 12,000 employees, or roughly 6 percent of its total workforce. Meta, Microsoft, Salesforce, Twitter, and other companies also have plans to lay off thousands of tech professionals.

However, it’s important to keep in mind that, even as the tech giants cut back, tech professionals are still needed for all kinds of jobs in virtually every sector of the economy. According to the latest data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the overall tech unemployment rate remains 1.8 percent. Also, the tech giants continue to have ambitious plans, and will eventually need to begin hiring again in key areas such as machine learning, augmented reality (AR), and beyond.