The global outbreak of the new coronavirus continues to have a major impact, especially to companies and their normal day-to-day routines.
For example, Apple has encouraged employees at the Apple Park campus to work from home today. That’s according to a tweet from Mark Gurman today, which is connected to an additional report at Business Insider. Apple is apparently “encouraging” employees at Apple Park to stay home today if they can, seeing it as an “additional precaution” due to coronavirus concerns.
The local retail stores, meanwhile, will apparently remain open.
This appears to simply be a recommendation at most, as some teams might find it difficult to work from home. The specific details of this new option aren’t known at this time. And Apple itself has not confirmed it has made any type of suggestion to its employees in a public fashion.
This isn’t quite the same thing as pulling out of a major film festival, which Apple did earlier this week when it decided to opt-out of attending this year’s SXSW film festival, where it originally planned to debut three different Apple TV+ originals.
And then there is still speculation about a March media event, which, at this point, seems like a no-brainer to “cancel”. (Apple hasn’t officially announced an event, so it wouldn’t really be canceling anything.) And, as usual, there’s plenty of people looking ahead to June, when Apple is expected to host the annual Worldwide Developers Conference. With companies like Facebook and Google canceling their own developers conferences, some might be expecting Apple to do the same.
The Santa Clara Public Health department recently suggested that companies “consider use of telecommuting options for appropriate employees”, so this latest move on Apple’s part could be due to that.
This is yet another reaction to the global coronavirus outbreak and COVID-19, the disease it causes. Will we see Apple cancel this year’s WWDC? What do you think?