You really have to hand it to Apple; the company knows how to ride out an economic downturn. Back when the bubble popped a few years back and high tech companies left and right were either going under, getting bought, bleeding cash, or-- at the very least-- laying off tens of thousands of employees (that means you, Motorola... Hello? Anyone still there?), Apple somehow managed to stay mostly profitable, grow its cash stockpile, design and develop scads of amazing new products, and avoid issuing a tidal wave of pink slips. Seriously, think about it for a while. You'll be mighty impressed-- and all that much sadder that CFO Fred Anderson, who is clearly some sort of magical money elf who can conjure cash from the very air, is retiring soon.

But back to the layoffs thing... while it's true that Apple never announced sweeping personnel cuts in order to staunch any arterial gushing, the company has certainly trimmed a little off the back and sides every so often to keep everything tidy. Of course, the guy receiving the pink slip doesn't much care if he's one of five or one of five hundred, but it sure makes a difference to Wall Street. For example, Dow Jones Business News is reporting that Apple has confirmed making "minor" job cuts in the past few weeks, but since it won't say how many people were sent packing, the company's stock price didn't suffer. Heck, it even went up a quarter today. (By the way, "Jones" is a perfectly respectable last name, but what kind of sadistic parents name their child "Dow"? That's just wrong.)

However, this latest round of "minor" cuts still has us a little concerned, since the article cites a former employee who claims that the layoffs occurred mostly in the education unit. It's probably just us, but it seems like for the past couple of years every time we've heard reports, confirmed or otherwise, about "minor work-force reductions" at Apple, the pink slips always seem to land somewhere in the middle of the folks tasked with putting more Macs in the schools. Well, actually, yes, it is just us; we've only found a couple such instances in the Reruns, but that just shows you how edgy we are about the whole education situation. Remember, we've got a 22-month-old on staff, here, and we can't help but worry about what kind of shape the nation's schools will be in by the time she traipses off to class. Will she have to contend with guns? No worries; we'll just make her watch The Matrix a few hundred times until she figures out how to dodge bullets. Drugs? C'mon, she lives with us; she has no need to make her life any weirder. Windows? Well, now, that could be a problem.

So no matter how many stories we see about schools dramatically improving test scores after giving AirPorted iBooks to every student, whenever we hear about more and more school districts tossing their Macs for cheap Dells and then we hear that Apple is once more laying off staff in its education division, we find ourselves wondering if Apple has essentially given up on the K-12 market as a whole. After all, it's certainly true that school budgets keep shrinking, so maybe Apple has concluded that it simply can't compete on price (which is the bottom line with budgets stretched so thin) and still remain profitable.

In other words, scaling back its focus on school sales might be exactly the sort of savvy financial move that kept the company so solvent through the downturn; unfortunately, that means an increasing number of children may well have to spend hours a day exposed to Windows whether they (or their parents) like it or not. Isn't that a violation of the Geneva Convention or something? Please, won't somebody think of the children?