Apple Computer Inc announced after the markets closed Friday the details of its anticipated restructuring plan. The plan calls for the lay-off of 4,100, or 30% of Apple’s 13,400 employees including 2,700 permanent staff and 1,400 part-time workers. The figure is just shy of analysts’ expectations of 5,000. The lay-offs will be mostly responsible for an estimated $155m charge to the company’s second-quarter earnings, with the rest attributable to the cancellation of contracts and asset write-offs. This is on top of charges related to the acquisition of Next Software Inc, which will come to about $350m, plus the substantial losses the company expects to show when it reports its second quarter in mid-April. And in yet another change to its somewhat confusing operating system strategy, Apple will now only ship one full release of MacOS next year – called Allegro, having abandoned plans for the Sonata release, which was due in the spring of 1998 (CI No 3,072). Between the full releases, system upgrades will be available through updates; two between MacOS 8 – which is due this July, and Allegro. After years of dabbling, Apple is finally giving up on its AIX Unix work, and is also scrapping its video conferencing products. Apple plans to maintain, but reduce investments in, Open Doc, the Cyberdog internet tools, Open Transport, Game Sprockets and OS Development Tools. The Performa brand will be discontinued although entry-level products will be continued under the PowerPC brand. Surprisingly, neither Newton or Claris are involved in the cutbacks. Chief financial officer Fred Anderson said revenues for the second quarter would be between $1.6bn and $1.7bn.
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