Andrew Kimery
Forum Replies Created
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[Mathieu Ghekiere] “If I’m not mistaken it was a shareholder that was complaining about the ‘Return on Investment’ of putting money and efforts in the assistive features Apple has in their systems for blind/deaf/disabled people. And Tim Cook said they don’t think about ‘damn ROI on features like that’, and if you are only looking for ROI, the shareholder was investing in the wrong company.”
After some Googling it looks like it said both things on the same call.
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[Bob Zelin] “EVERYONE CAN DO IT. If you were to say “I am a printer” – you would sneer. And if you were to say ” I am a data entry person” – or “I am a word processor” – you would sneer. And this is EXACTLY what will happen one day soon. Do I care – no – I am old, I will be out of it before this happens, but for young people that are professional editors – well, they are screwed, and Bill Davis will say “SEE – I TOLD YOU SO”. “
‘Everyone’ has been able to do it for a solid fifteen years with iMovie and an inexpensive DV camera though. ‘Everyone’ can cook their own meals, drive their own cars, and/or tile their own bathrooms. But not everyone wants do all these things which is why restaurants are still a thing, public and commercial transportation is still a thing, bathroom remodelers are still a thing…
Some things are changing a lot. Some things change very little. I agree though that if what one does can be easily/adequately done by novice (or a machine) then one probably needs to up their game before it’s too late.
Are all the gigs going to pay what people made ‘back in the day’? No, but they don’t necessary need to. Thanks to changing tech you don’t need invest a small fortune in gear or have to live/work in a super expensive place like LA or NY in order to make a living. Sure, some opportunities are rarely found outside of those to major markets, but that’s just the way it is.
And while I think there is more growth in the generalist side of things there is still growth (and need) for specialists as well.
For example, a few years ago I wasn’t selected for a long term gig at a large company because they were looking for a shooter/editor and I was just an editor (that used to shoot a long time ago). Everyone there was a hybrid (producer/shooter, editor/producer, shooter/editor, etc.,) and I just didn’t fit that mold. I would still gig for them from time to time when they were extra busy, someone was out sick, etc…
Then one day they brought me in for a few months to work on a feature piece (a documentary short) because they needed an editor (as opposed to someone that just knows how to edit). I did two more feature pieces for them that year and they eventually hired me full time because forcing everyone to wear multiple hats meant no one had the time to edit the amount of content they had at the required level of quality.
[Bill Davis] “I’m pretty sure that as a publicly traded company, Apple has a duty to stockholders not to pay any more in taxes than they are legally obligated to.”
[Bill Davis] “Great swaths of large corporations rushed to those troughs. So if Apple, with a fiduciary duty to it’s shareholders didn’t participate in those perfectly legal offerings – that’s something the shareholders could legitimately take them to task over. “
This line of thought is a commonly held myth. There is no law forcing publicly traded companies in the US to do anything and everything in order to ‘maximize shareholder value’. Companies are required to work in shareholders’ ‘best interests’ but best interest could be giving employees raises (to improve moral/productivity), not doing funky things with their taxes (thus avoiding potentially damaging PR and fines), and not dumping toxic waste into the local water supply (even though that would be cheaper than proper disposal).
It’s based on a 100yr old court case where Henry Ford stopped paying dividends to Ford shareholders so he could lower the prices on Ford cars. Obviously the shareholders were upset, Ford told them take a short walk off a long pier, they sued and the court basically that ruled corporate directors can’t simply ignore the the needs of shareholders like that, but that doesn’t mean the directors are beholden to every shareholder whim either.
Since then the courts and the government have given corporate directors very wide latitude in how to run their companies (even when some of the decisions upset share folders). For an on-forum example, somewhat recently on an earnings call a shareholder was a bit hostile towards Apple’s growing investment in green (thus more expensive) energy. Tim Cook told the guy that if he’s not comfortable with green energy he’s got stock in the wrong company. I also remember on more than one occasion Costco’s CEO ignoring the pleas of shareholders to low employee wages, cut employee benefits, etc., in order to goose the stock price.
IMO the ‘maximize shareholder value’ myth was popularized by corporate raiders, activist investors looking to pump n’ dump stock, executives with bonuses tied to short term financial milestones, and pretty much anyone else who needed to justify doing anything and everything (sometimes legal, sometimes not) to squeeze one more penny into their pocket.
/soapbox
-Andrew
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Three thoughts:
1. the Mac sales numbers took a hit in part because the MBP shipped late and missed the window for the previous quarter.2. Vender lock-in aka walled gardens aka gilded cages can be very profitable which is why, to our detriment as consumers, we will continue to see more of them, not less of them.
3. Apple is still, at it’s heart, a hardware company. If you want all the spiffy mobile devices to computer to home devices synergy you have to have Apple hardware through and through.
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[Bill Davis] “I’d just change that to “most Apple customers value low weight and low noise..””
Apple has a long history of praising what they have, condemning what they don’t and then praising what they just condemned as soon as they have it, so I’d say what most Apple customers value changes based on what they are being sold. ????
[Bill Davis] “Again, I’d argue that anyone working with 5K Scarlet-W clips is the very definition of an edge case. This is again the view that professional video editors are the CORE of MacBook Pro consumers. “
Replace “video editor” with ‘anyone with a CPU intensive task’ and all of a sudden you have a much larger demographic.
[Bill Davis] “But I don’t hear much about people flocking away from MacBook Pros to laptops from PC manufacturers for purely performance reasons. That IS sometimes talked about when discussing price alone. But not so much performance alone, IME.”
If Apple licensed MacOS out to other hardware makers I think you’d see a lot of people choosing to buy non-Apple laptops, but when the only option is to leave Apple’s walled garden the decision is a harder one to make (hence the point of the walled garden).
At least I’m glad we finally all agree that, by design, the 2018 i9 MBP doesn’t perform as well as other i9 laptops which don’t place as much emphasis on size and weight.
[Bill Davis] “IF constant GruntCrunch type of work is your goal – any laptop, really makes little sense. “
Obviously, though this splinter thread was about laptops vs laptop performance, not laptop vs desktop performance. No one expects desktop performance out of a laptop, but I’m sure most people that see the advertised max clock speed of the MBP just assume it can sustain that speed for more than a matter of seconds before getting throttled down to its base clock speed.
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[Bill Davis] “Creativity by committee is a kinda difficult bar to clear, IMO.
Sure ASSEMBLY by committee is easy as pie. So if that’s the goal – there should be clear sailing ahead. But that kinda pushes editors into a roles as assembly line players, more than as discrete storytellers.
Which might or might not where a particular editor wants to go.
Interesting discussion, anyway.”
I don’t think creativity by committee is determined by the number of editors working on a project though. It’s determined by the number of people in charge of the direction of the project. For example, six VPs weighing in on a corporate video being cut by one editor is creativity by committee where as six editors collaboratively executing the vision of a single director is not.
IMO editors have never been, nor will they ever be, discrete storytellers because they rely on another people to write, shoot and/or direct in order to create the material before it ever reaches the editor. Collaboration is inherent to the art and the craft.
With regards to assembling vs creativity… I think that depends on the project. I’ve certainly worked solo on projects that were mind numbing, paint-by-numbers gigs that were basically an assembly line of one, and, on the other hand, I’ve been part of creatively challenging and rewarding work on multi-editor projects where five people might have been involved in editing a single episode of a show (six if you count the story producer).
There is certainly something nice about being the solo editor on a project and ‘owning’ the whole thing, but on the other hand being part of a team (especially as a freelancer that will change gigs many times a year) means you are regularly exposed to new people, new points of view, new ways to tackle problems, new styles of editing… it’s a great way to stay fresh and not get trapped in old habits or ruts.
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[Bill Davis] “Well, if you say so.
(I’m presuming you have a computer hardware engineering degree and a clear understanding of their implementation, of course.)
“Any small form factor computer (be it desktop or laptop) will have to throttle a CPU like the i9 because there simply isn’t strong enough cooling to let the CPU go full tilt for any extended period of time (I’m working under the assumption that exotic cooling methods are not being employed). Couple that with the fact that Apple values low weight and low noise more than performance and it shouldn’t be surprising that Apple’s laptops will throttle more, and throttle sooner than, say, gaming laptops which will be much larger and have better cooling solutions because performance is valued above low weight and low noise.
The much bigger (relative to a laptop) iMacs can aggressively throttle their CPUs which leads some people to install software on their iMacs to manually control the fans. This allows them to run the fans sooner thus leading to less CPU throttling, but at the cost of having a louder machine. Even pro-Apple videos/websites (some of which wrongfully doubted the original reviewer’s results) are completely upfront that Apple will be more apt to throttle in order to get a thinner, lighter, quieter product out the door (and for many users this is a preferred trade off).
[Michael Gissing] “Unfortunately the heavy users like DITs on set in jungle and desert conditions or on the go graphics people who are pushing deadlines are the ones most likely to encounter issues.”
The original reviewer that started this whole thing was transcoding a five and half minute long 5K Scarlet-W clip into 4K H.264 in his home (which presumable is air conditioned). Not exactly an edge case. 😉
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[Bill Davis] “We just have to accept that we now live in a Ready – Fire – Aim universe.”
???
A reviewer found a flaw in a product, shared the flaw with the public, product’s maker acknowledged the problem, and released an update to address it.
The reviewer didn’t get it wrong, he just happened to get it right so fast that many people assumed he had to have gotten it wrong. The knee-jerk reaction to the reviewer is where Ready – Fire – Aim took place.
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[Oliver Peters] “Thermal issues? :/”
Hopefully they won’t step in that particular cow pie again…
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[Bob Zelin] “But it appears that within a relatively short period of time, Apple has determined that for it’s business model – they want ANYTHING but this to happen. They want to be as far away from the model of the old Mac Pro Cheesegrater design as possible. “
Jobs wanted the Apple 1 to be a sealed box and it was only because of Woz that it wasn’t. Selling an untinkerable ‘computing appliance’ has always been Jobs’ goal (and therefore Apple’s goal). I’d imagine the next MP will have much more in common with the Trashcan than with the Cheesegrater
-Andrew
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[Brett Sherman] “But a look at job postings show this is what employers are looking for. The number of job listings in my area that require multiple talents far, far, far outweighs specialized job offerings. It could be I’m in a unique area. Or it could be that I’m in a non-LA, non-NY area.”
To me this seems like just the natural progression of specialist vs generalist. The market, and the niches within that market, will certainly influence the breadth and depth of skills that you need.