In mid-April President Trump announced many of the esteemed executives, economists, scholars, and industry leaders who together will form various Great American Economic Revival Industry Groups. Apple was listed at the top of the technology sector as one of the companies who lead by example reopening their businesses in a steady and safe manner. Last week we posted a report titled "A Trickle of U.S. Apple Stores will begin Reopening next week in less Populated Cities in Alaska, Idaho, South Carolina and more."

Late this afternoon we're learning that Apple is also planning to soon start returning more employees to its major global offices in phases over the next few months.

In Apple's first phase, staff members who can’t work remotely or that are facing challenges working from home. This phase has already begun in some regions globally. It will expand to major offices throughout the latter half of May and early June.

In Apple's second phase, which is scheduled to begin sometime in July, will return even more employees to Apple’s offices globally. In the U.S., company locations in cities including New York, Los Angeles, Austin, Texas, San Diego and Boulder, Colorado will begin to phase back.

Facebook and Google have said that most employees can work from home through 2020. Amazon said that office workers will be able to work from home until early October and Twitter Inc. said staff can work from home "forever" if they choose, reports CNBC.

Bloomberg's report further noted that "Since the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis, Apple has allowed a select group of employees to work in their offices to keep operations running. Certain roles, such as managing data centers, deploying software, putting up new products for sale online and some hardware testing, are more difficult or impossible from home and are considered business critical.

The first swath of employees returning to offices will likely focus on hardware development. Apple’s labs for future major hardware initiatives, such as planned virtual-reality and augmented-reality headsets, have been dialed back during the work from home period, one of the people said.

Apple’s legion of software developers have mostly settled in to working from home with the company planning its late June developers conference as a virtual affair. Apple engineers are filming demonstrations of the planned software updates from home for the online presentations as part of the conference. For more on this, read the full Bloomberg report.