ZDNet: News: Apple rallies troops after slump -- "Jobs reportedly told employees that the company plans no layoffs; a hiring freeze is in effect, Jobs said, with a few exceptions."

Also...

"Meanwhile, Jobs said, the company is considering scaling back a number of nonessential projects, although he reportedly did not identify which products would be affected by the cuts."

Someone rightly asked how projects could be scaled back without layoffs. Well, one way would be to reassign those people to essential projects -- if there are any programmers working on non-essential projects you can bet they'll be reassigned to the Mac OS X project, or some close derivative.

I've heard Apple had been hiring WebObjects developers like mad for their iServices department -- seeing as that's a pretty profitable business, I wonder if if it will be an "exceptional" area not to be hit with a hiring freeze.

My take on this whole Apple thing: (look at Jim the Apple pundit!)

The sky is NOT falling. Apple needs to admit the Cube is a failure, come up with another non-iMac computer that people can afford and would want to buy, fast. In the mean time cut the price of the Cube BIG time.. they have huge margins on the G4 and PowerBook, not sure about the Cube but they've got some room to work with, I'm guessing.

They need to do this so that confidence is up and no-one is predicting their doom when OS X is released, because confidence alone could make or break the OS X debut, I'm afraid.

I'm hearing from many PC and Linux/BSD users who are totally interested in buying Macs JUST so that they can run OS X -- yes it really is THAT good. They can't miss that opportunity.