Wouldn't you know it? Mere hours after we stated that "at least we haven't heard of any Cupertino pink slips" last week, someone had to go and prove us wrong. C'mon, folks, we appreciate the effort, but we don't need anyone's help to make us look bad; we can manage that just fine all by ourselves. Really! We do it all the time, so don't put yourselves out on our account.

See, we had been revelling in the fact that other high-tech companies (most recently Compaq) were weathering this darn "economic downturn" in part by laying off thousands of workers, while Apple had so far managed to avoid showing a few thousand employees the door. That's when faithful viewer Alan Carr wrote in to mention that Mac OS Rumors had since been updated with a report about how Apple has indeed been shedding itself of paycheck-drawing employees-- but in such a quiet manner that most outside observers would never suspect. Uh-oh! Was it us? Did we jinx things?

While the official explanation for Apple's reduced headcount is "attrition," rumor has it that the company has actually been sneakily laying off a few people here and a few people there... always under the radar, and certainly never enough to warrant one of those "Corporation X Announces 5,000 Job Cuts" headlines we find all too familiar these days. One such group that experienced scattered layoffs was the group inhabiting Apple's Austin, TX digs. Another was the Cube development team-- but then, we knew that already. In any event, okay, fine, maybe Apple is cutting jobs... but it's just a few pink slips fluttering by here and there, and nothing at all like the storms of jobs cuts pummelling Compaq and Motorola these days.

Hopefully this is just an incident of poor timing, because we'd hate to think that we somehow caused the alleged layoffs-- either by tempting the fates, or by giving Steve Jobs an easy way to prove us wrong. In a "big picture" sense, though, if they've managed to stay out of the mainstream press, Apple's stealth layoffs must be few and far between. And in fact, Apple can't be in too bad a shape, since we know of at least one individual who was just hired at One Infinite Loop-- hiring freeze, shmiring freeze. So if Apple is still adding the occasional Steveketeer to the line-up, any layoffs are probably more about refocusing than opening a vein in a desperate attempt to return to profitability. (How's that for positive thinking?)