> "Many employees" will be moving to jobs within Apple only insomuch as ~5% of 2000 people is arguably "many" (or whatever the size of the autonomous vehicle software team is).
I would expect the majority of the people on that team to be working on autonomous driving. So the software folks would be a good fit for genAI and most of the remainder would be mechanical and electronics folks working on the sensors who also have very transfer skills in a company that builds their own hardware.
From all the rumors I've heard Apple was never planning on building this car from scratch, so most those 2000 employees weren't focused on designing a car.
> From all the rumors I've heard Apple was never planning on building this car from scratch
One theory was that Apple started their own car project in the mid-2010s to retain their top UX and SWE (and AI) talent because Tesla was poaching them all (and it shows: Tesla's visual UI designs is very Apple-ish: clean, consistent, tasteful, especially when compared to the mishmash you get on a Ford, Toyota, or even BMW); and I don't think it's a coincidence that Tesla's self-driving project really took-off after Siri started getting worse...
The other plausible theory was that ever since Apple launched CarPlay, they realised how inept the bulk of the carmaker industry is when it comes to software/high-technology and they saw an opportunity to make their own self-driving software platform and then license it out to automakers, and using CarPlay as a beachead into the carmaker industry; I want to believe this because it does make the most sense... excepting how those same automakers tend to be very protective of their brand identity: we've seen how GM and others clearly resent having to share their platform with AndroidAuto and CarPlay, so there's no way they'd publicly license Apple's tech - though still, some might. I speculate that had this plan ever worked Apple would have spun-off the company rather than try to put the Apple brand on it - but I don't think Apple has really spun-off any companies since ClarisWorks.
At the other-end of the plausibility spectrum, I noticed a lot of people (MacRumors' forums, et al) wanted to believe Apple was somehow going to ship a one-size-fits-all "iCar", with styling right out of the Bondi Blue iMac G3 book - and as the 1990s jokes go - it would only work driving on Apple owned highways, require an proprietary EV charging connector on a cable that gets frayed after only a few months, and if you get a chip in the windscreen you have to replace the whole thing.
I would expect the majority of the people on that team to be working on autonomous driving. So the software folks would be a good fit for genAI and most of the remainder would be mechanical and electronics folks working on the sensors who also have very transfer skills in a company that builds their own hardware.
From all the rumors I've heard Apple was never planning on building this car from scratch, so most those 2000 employees weren't focused on designing a car.