Brand: MacNews

Charles Haddad’s latest Byte of the Apple column for Business Week discusses Apple’s news-driven stock price, which has languished of late following lackluster Macworld Expo New York announcements and the announcement that no new products will be released at AppleExpo Paris next month.

Apple’s twice-yearly re-organization has taken place earlier than normal as about 50 employees across the US were laid off Tuesday, MacMinute has learned. The layoffs took place across the company as upper management re-thought department business plans and consolidated positions, sources said. Unlike other high tech firms that have recently announced massive layoffs, Apple has not been forced into such cutbacks. Twice yearly, Apple re-assesses its business strategy and has lay-offs usually in the early fiscal-first and third quarters, various sources have confirmed.

An Interactive Week article takes a look at Apple’s possible announcements at AppleExpo or Seybold next month, as well as the company’s general standing in Europe.

Seagate today is demonstrating its new Barracuda ATA IV hard drive, a virtually silent 7,200RPM drive that features Seagate’s proprietary SoftSonic Fluid Dynamic Bearing motors. There’s no word on when the drive will be available to the public.

Motorola is working to develop a memory controller directly on its higher-end PowerPC chips, reports The Register, a move that could provide a significant performance boost. By placing the controller on the chip, the processor could receive instructions at its clock speed, not the speed of the system bus. The technology would replace, and perform better, than the L2 and L3 caches that the processor currently use to help buffer instructions being sent to the processor.