Apple's saviour, the iMac, will have lost some of its lustre this week for the workforce at the company's European manufacturing base in Hollyhill, Cork, where staff heard they would be paying a high price for the success of the new-look translucent computer - 450 jobs to be precise. The fact that many of these were temporary workers will have done little to lift the gloom descending over the plant. What hurts most for those at the plant is that they felt they had given a lot last year in order to save the plant from possible closure and secure the European manufacturing of the new computer. The transfer of iMac production to a Korean firm with a plant in south Wales leaves only one of the group's products in production at Cork and Apple bosses did little to inspire confidence for the future among the 500 remaining staff in expressly refusing to commit the company to the area.

So much for the price of success. Apparently it was the very fact that the iMac was such a success in the US - far beyond the expectations of company bosses - that it needed to look elsewhere for production lines with enough capacity to produce the mould-breaking computer in sufficient quantities and at a lower cost than at present.