Heads up, people; it's 10-Q time again, which means that fans of overly-cautious, bordering-on-gloomy financial filings can pore over a ridiculously huge volume of stuff in hopes of extracting some relevant dirt about everyone's favorite Cupertino fruit market. Or, as faithful viewer Bob Gulien suggests, you could just take a quick peek at The Register's bite-sized coverage instead, thereby saving yourself eight or nine hours of sifting through data so dry it would put a heavily-caffeinated hummingbird into a coma. It's entirely up to you. We're all about free will.

Probably the most relevant figure is an actual number attached to the unspecified job cuts which Apple briefly mentioned in last month's quarterly earnings report; it seems that the company had 425 positions headed for the axe-- according to CNET, 375 have already been trimmed, and 50 more are still being primed for the chopping block. These positions were mainly in the "operations, information systems, and administrative areas," and while pinks slips are never good news, we're trying to decide whether it would be terribly gauche to be thankful that at least Apple isn't shedding engineers and developers. These cuts look more like the pruning of a balanced company calmly reacting to changes in the economic tides than a last-ditch effort to cauterize fiscal bleeding.

Let's look at a f'rinstance, here. F'rinstance, according to Yahoo! Finance, Apple's last reported headcount was 9,603; back in October of last year, that number was 8,568. And about a year earlier in September of 2000, Apple had a mere 6,960 employees. So even taking those 425 pink slips into account, it looks to us like Apple is still growing overall at a time when other companies are sawing off limbs to stay afloat.

Sure, if Apple had managed to avoid layoffs completely, it'd be a lot nicer for everybody-- not least the poor (ex-)Apple employees who are now, or will soon be, out of a job. Still, though, we see a pretty noticeable difference between Apple's job cuts and, say, Gateway's. But then again, whereas Apple is being run by a brilliant marketer with the uncanny ability to bend people to his will, Gateway is being run by a man perfectly willing to go on television and show the world that he solicits business advice from a talking cow...