There's some pretty unsettling news floating around out there, folks, and we're not talking about the fact that Larry "Zero Shares" Ellison was on Apple's board of directors for five whole years and waited until after he left to finally pick up some stock, as Reuters is reporting. Nor are we referring to Apple's new "Jingle Bells and Whistles" promo, which brings an eMac with a G4 processor, a 17-inch CRT, and a combo CD-RW/DVD-ROM drive down to $999, while a classic iMac with a G3, a 15-inch CRT, and a plain vanilla CD-ROM drive still costs $799-- thus creating a price/performance disparity so vast that the very fabric of reality is in danger of being torn asunder. Seriously, it's not that, either. Although you might want to stock up on canned goods.

No, we're talking about a report-- an as-yet completely unsubstantiated report, mind you-- of a "massive reorganization effort" underway at Apple. While reorganization in and of itself isn't necessarily a bad thing, we're hearing troubling things about Apple perhaps having just laid off hundreds of employees last week-- maybe even close to a thousand. Yes, a thousand. Now, we want to mention right off the bat that we're maintaining a nice, healthy skepticism about this rumor, mostly due to logistical reasons. Basically, we don't care how scary Steve Jobs is (well, okay, yes we do... sir!): if a thousand people get the shaft, then at least some of them are going to march straight off to the press and start blabbing about it. (What's Apple going to do-- fire them?) And yet we're hearing that these alleged layoffs took place last week, but we see absolutely zilch about any job cuts at any of the "respectable" news sites. So most likely we're just hallucinating again.

That said, though, the report we hallucinated indicated that the heaviest concentration of alleged layoffs took place in Apple's education division-- and we heard something else about Jim Marshall leaving in rather a hurry. Last we heard, Jim Marshall was heading up the education sales team, though that was maybe six months ago. And just to make this Big Ball of Uncertainty and Ickiness just a leetle bit bigger, take a gander at Think Secret's latest report on Apple's PowerSchool division canceling projects left and right like it's the hottest new dance craze. We can't help feeling that all this spells something Not Entirely Nice™ for the future of Apple's prospects in the education market. But for now, we're just going to sit tight and see if anything real actually comes of any of this...