Come Back!

Apple makes it easy to work from home—unless you work for Apple

- Joshua Brustein

Last month, Apple published a promotional video titled Escape From the Office. The heroes of the almost 9-minute ad are a group of employees at a fictional company called Arca who respond to the requirement that they return to a physical office by quitting and launching their own startup. Using Apple’s iPads, MacBook Pros, and software, they then build their own office-less business.

A week before its tribute to remote work, Apple Inc. gave its own workers a timeline by which they’d have to return to their offices. To some, including 7,500 of the company’s 165,000 employees who belong to a Slack room dedicated to advocating for remote work, it was bruising. “They are trolling us, right?” one wrote. Others called the ad “distasteful” and “insulting.” The underlying message: Apple knows that corporate employees—using its products as tools—can capably work from home. So why can’t its own staff? Apple has been primarily a remote company since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. It recorded several blockbuster quarters and shipped dozens of new products while its employees worked from their garages and spare bedrooms; in the last holiday quarter alone, the company generated about $124 billion in revenue, an increase of more than 25% from what it had made in the same period before the virus.

Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive officer, has said the growth of remote work drove new demand for such products as iPads and was “very critical” to the company’s financial success. The previous version of office culture may never return, he predicted. “Normal will become something different,” he told investors in October 2020.