Wouldn't you know it? More bad news in Appleville. We'll keep this short, because we're starting to depress ourselves, and we're all out of Pez so we won't be able to self-medicate back to a healthy emotional state. Besides, does anybody like dwelling on the subject of pink slips?

That's right, pink slips. Layoffs. Jobs Go Bye-Bye. While Apple has managed to avoid the massive-scale stem-the-bleeding-style layoffs that were so popular in high-tech during the "corrections" of the past few years (Motorola was probably the king, here, with over 48,000 job cuts over a 16-month period), apparently the company nixed a couple hundred workers on Tuesday morning without warning. Faithful viewer Tony Wren sent us a KCRA article which reports that Apple has confirmed the pink slips and states that the reason behind them is that the company is shutting down its Sacramento manufacturing plant. No plant, no jobs; it's an easy equation to grasp, if not necessarily an easy one to accept-- especially for those poor folks who suddenly found themselves unemployed.

As for why Apple is closing the plant, the company says that the move is "part of an ongoing effort to make its operations more efficient." Uh-oh, do you smell what we smell? Do we detect a faint but distinctive whiff of Eau de Globalization in the air? Everybody knows someone who lost a job when a company outsourced chunks of its business to India or whatever, and now it seems that Apple, too, has fallen prey to the lure of cheap offshore labor; the company's statement says that it's taking most of the "manufacturing activities" formerly handled by the Sacramento facility and moving them to a supplier in some country called "Southern California." We hope Apple doesn't run into any language problems.

Anyway, the bright side to this whole sordid affair-- well, bright to anyone who still has a job, at least-- is that Apple still isn't cutting jobs just for the sake of stemming any bleeding; the company is quick to point out that "while this action will result in a reduction of operations staff, Apple's overall headcount worldwide continues to grow." So there's no particular reason to expect a nasty red-ink surprise at Apple's quarterly earnings conference call on Wednesday afternoon (by the way, you did remember to enter our Beat The Analysts contest, right?), because the jobs aren't so much disappearing, as they are migrating. To "Southern California," wherever the heck that happens to be.

We can only pray that Apple doesn't outsource its tech support there, too, because otherwise we'll all have to struggle with phone techs who speak with a thick Southern Californian accent...