Apple axes 1,600 full-time retail positions

This is misleading, they lost 1,600 full-time (or equivalent) workers. This could mean a lot of their part-time workers getting extra hours could no longer get extra hours, it doesn't mean they 'axed' 1,600 full-time positions, they likely cut the hours of 1,600 part-time employees.

Then there's the whole, it was the Christmas season. I bet if you look back at records for the past decade there's either been a decline in employees in Q2 as apposed to Q1 or that their growth rate stalls in the Q2 as they no longer need new workers. Then I bet if you look at Q4, there's a big employment spike for the Christmas season.

There's too many variables here to say Apple predicted the recession. Maybe they did, however there's much more practical reasons why this decision would have been made.

The best reason I can think of is that when the economy started to falter, they reduced part-time workers hours. I don't know about Apples statistics, but most retail companies tend to have double (or more) the number of part-time workers as full-time (usually due to paying less in benefits). This likely means Apple has 28,000 part-time employees, 1,600 of which could have been working extra at Christmas to, you know, pay for Christmas.

Once again, a title shouts "Panic at the economy" while the actual meat of the article says something completely different.