But now for the good news

The New York Times has another technology blog by Saul Hansell that tells the other side of the story:

One lingering image from the Great Depression is that of people selling apples on the street. This recession may be remembered for a certain chain of stores selling a very different kind of Apple.
Intel is laying off thousands of people. The PC industry is floundering. Circuit City is liquidating. Yet the leading maker of pretty-looking expensive technology toys just blew away all expectations for sales and profits. The recession in some ways has helped Apple. Lower prices for memory chips and LCD display panels helped boost its profit margins. Tim Cook, the company’s chief operating officer, said he believed that many manufacturers were selling components at cost, so the recession bonus wouldn’t last. In fact, the company predicts its margins will shrink by the second half of the year. As for product mix, the company sold 3 percent more iPods in the last quarter of 2008 than the year before; analysts were expecting sales in that mature market to shrink. Meanwhile, sales of the iPhone fell short of expectations. Apple sold 4.4 million phones in the quarter, compared to estimates of 5 million. Nobody asked Apple executives to explain this. Maybe iPods appear to be better values to strapped consumers than iPhones, which require a $90-a-month cellphone contract.
Perhaps the hardest thing to explain in the current economy was the strength of Apple’s Mac line, which is priced above the mass-market models of Dell, Hewlett-Packard and other PC makers. Apple’s notebook sales rose by 34 percent from a year earlier.
Apple suggested that it was prepared to enter the market for small low-cost notebooks, often called netbooks. “We’ve got some interesting ideas here,” Mr. Cook said. But he savaged the current crop of products, saying their keyboards were too small and they were underpowered. “We don’t think that people will be pleased with those types of products, but we will see,” he said. Mr. Cook was a little more optimistic about Apple TV, its device for getting movies to a TV over the Internet. He said sales tripled over a year ago, driven largely by interest in online movie rentals. While he again referred to the TV business as a “hobby”, he said, “We will continue to invest it in it. We fundamentally believe there is something there for us in the future.”
Indeed, when asked about cost-cutting, Peter Oppenheimer, the company’s chief financial officer, didn’t talk specifically about layoffs or other cutbacks. But he certainly was a great deal more optimistic than many other rivals. “We will invest our way through this downturn as we did the last one,” he said.

Rico says Apple's been-there-done-that in recessions, so it'll weather this one, too...