As a former employee under both Jobs and Cook, I can tell you exactly what is wrong with Apple.

When I started with Apple, every thing we were concerned with was innovating. What could we come up with next? Sure, there were plenty of misses, but when we hit, we hit big. It was ingrained in the culture of the company. Managers wanted creative people, people who might not have been the best worker bee, but that could come up with new concepts easily. Sometimes corporate rules were broken, but if you could show that you were actively working towards something new, then you were OK.

Fast forward to when Cook started running the show, Steve was still alive, but had taken a backseat really. Metrics became a thing. Performance became a watchword. Managers didn't want creative thought, they wanted people who would put their nose to the grindstone and only work on things that headquarters suggested. Apple was no longer worried about innovating, they were concerned with 'maintaining'.

Two examples which might help illustrate further:

1. One of the guys I was working with was constantly screwing around in any free moment with iMovie. He was annoyed at how slow it was in rendering, which at the time was done on the CPU power. Did some of his regular work suffer, yeah. But he was praised because his concepts helped to shift some of the processing to the GPU and allow real time effects. This functionality made iMovie HD 6 amazing to work with.

2. In a different section of the company, the support side, a new manager improved call times, customer service stats, customer satisfaction, and drastically cut down on escalations. However, his team was considered to be:

a. making the other teams look bad

and

b. abusing the use of customer satisfaction tools, like giving a free iPod shuffle (which literally costs a few dollars to make) to extremely upset customers.

Now they were allowed to do all of these things, no rules were being broken. But Cook was mostly in charge by that point and he was more concerned with every damn penny. So, soon after this team blew all the other teams away for the 3rd month in a row, the new manager was demoted and the team was broken up, to be integrated into other teams willy-nilly.

Doing smart things was no longer the 'thing'. Toeing the line was. Until that changes, nothing is going to get better for Apple. I know I personally left due to stress and health issues from the extreme pressure that Cook kept sending downstream on us worker bees. My job, which I had loved, literally destroyed my health over a year.

>> ^dag:

[ahem] Get a Mac and iMovie.


Shuddup Dag

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

[ahem] Get a Mac and iMovie.

Yeah, it's royality free music from iMovie by Paul Dylin. You'll recognise this one as well that used a lot called "piano ballad" (aka : Change of mind): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfgLKthswuE which reminds me of Billy Joel.

Why is this song on so many youtube videos? Is it a library track from iMovie or something?

This guy is hilarious. Nice recipe too. I might have to make it for New Years.

Cubase, Logic, Digital Performer and Pro Tools are common, popular pro digital audio workstations. They all cost several hundreds of dollars and are fairly complicated to use, especially if you are new to digital audio. Cubase and Logic seem to be popular in the remix/electronic music scene. Digital Performer is popular among film composers. Pro Tools is a popular choice for TV/Film sound design and mixing. I use Digital Performer and like it a lot. It's slick and powerful.

There are cheaper, simpler options out there. I believe Apple's 'Garage Band' is to music editing, what 'iMovie' is to video editing, though I've never tried it.

>> ^blankfist:

With a little bit of iMovie know-how this could've been significantly less than 8 minutes and 49 seconds of boring.


Well... thanks for watching anyway.

With a little bit of iMovie know-how this could've been significantly less than 8 minutes and 49 seconds of boring.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

We have tried the lego stop-motion with mixed results. My kids prefer making actual movies- They've made a couple that I know will be family gems that we'll treasure forever. It's a great exercise because they write the script and then get the props together- and film the scenes- and put it together in iMovie. My daughter has decided she wants to be a film editor.

The people who made this video probably cut it on iMovie or Window's Movie Maker using FLVs they downloaded from YouTube. These guys are unknown, amateur filmmakers with a budget that was most likely nonexistent.


Oh, so as long as you don't have a big budget it's okay to promote hatred with the way you edit your video? I suppose it would be just as fine for me to put together a whole hour of clips with Jews beating and killing non-Jews? Well, I know some might not object to that actually.
How about an hour of Arabs beating and killing non-Arabs?
How about an hour of African American's beating or killing white people?

What exactly is so hard about this to get through to some people? Why is it so easy to ignore something inciting hatred when people feel that hate is justified.

>> ^NetRunner:
Going back to Sicko, what if Moore had instead filled his film with people from insurance companies, who felt quite righteous about denying people's claims? Maybe toss in some secret video of clerks violating existing laws about discrimination. Cut to lots of film of people getting told they can't get a life saving treatment because they can't afford it. Maybe just an endless succession of people who lost their homes because of medical expenses. Then a long succession of people who're alive but gruesomely crippled because they couldn't get proper treatment. Cut back to CEOs explaining how that's necessary for them to stay in business, maybe entice one to say that people who can't pay don't deserve care, or just rant about how this is the American way, and to do otherwise would be socialism. Then cut to the life of excess the CEO's live. Then show people talking to Congressmen about the issue and getting stonewalled.

Close with a link to charities that provide free medical help.

Never mention other countries or the politicians putting forward the single-payer bill.

Wouldn't that be a very different kind of film?


It would. I don't think he did that because of two reasons. First, he wanted to show the other countries with national health care and the politicians pushing health care reform because it further helped with his propagandized message. Second, and this is the most important aspect, Michael Moore is a professional filmmaker with the budget to hire a film crew and shoot interviews with politicians and travel to the other countries.

The people who made this video probably cut it on iMovie or Window's Movie Maker using FLVs they downloaded from YouTube. These guys are unknown, amateur filmmakers with a budget that was most likely nonexistent.

If these amateur filmmakers had the financial ability to hire a film crew, coordinate interviews, make a shot list they could afford to shoot, and pay for the post process to go back to a 35mm print like Michael Moore can with his docus, then this could've been a very different piece of filmmaking.

It's ignorant to compare content via the editing process like you just did, because it's not just about what you cut to... it's about what you can afford to cut to.

>> ^budzos:
Yeah but how is that any better than buying a nice PC and the equivalent software? It's fucking six of one, half dozen of the other, except with PC you get more choice.


You find me equivalent software.

I can't.

Really.

There's nothing that's half as good as iMovie and iDVD for creating movies/dvds easily and yet with nice flexibility to do funky stuff when wanted.

I cannot at all vouch for whether they are good with a wide range of media formats, but I find it hard to think they could possibly be worse than Windows DVD Maker which dies at the 99% mark without prior warning with all sorts of media formats.

I completely agree with those sticking up for the Mac here.

While I have posted elsewhere (the sub $1000 laptop sift most recently) that Mac has zero entry level pcs/laptops, the comparison you're making here is a little off base.

I just bought myself a sub $AU900 Dell laptop, with a 15" screen. The cheapest Mac Laptop with a screen that size is $2600. That's an insane divide, and one I cannot justify at all.

The gap you're showing here though is not as much, and you would have to start weighing up the pros of the Mac.

For me, I would LOOOOVE iLife. iMovie and iDVD, from my brief playing with them, run absolute bloody rings around Windows Movie Maker and Windows DVD Maker.

Having unix type OS under the hood would indeed make my coding tasks easier also (running local servers etc.).

So these things ARE worth a premium.

Are Macs better built and more reliable? Don't really think so, recently when being with some Mac users, one of their quite new Mac Book Pro's fan was whirring away maniacally. I mentioned how noisy the Mac was compared to the Dell I was using (which I couldn't even hear) and he said that the fan was about to die, and it was a really common issue with the Macs.

Right.

Buying a Mac is NOT 'simply fucking rediculous[sic]', it is a matter of choice. If a PC does all you want, then yeah, you can get a laptop for a lot less. BUT if you start to value some of the software that Macs have included with them, and having a unix backend, then you may start to think the extra dosh is worth it.

YOU don't want one.

Why do you feel the need to loudly justify yourself to everyone and try to shout down those that think Macs are worthwhile? Seems pretty juvenile, and the sort of thing I used to do when I was 9 about my ZX Spectrum compared to Commodore 64s.

I am not a hipster (I grew up in/live in echo park, and I hate their parking spot taking/beard growing ways), but I have to say that most of the time, a mac is a good deal.

It just works.

Another reason is the bundled and subsidized software. iMovie and Final Cut Express are unmatched on PC. I LOL when I see the MS PC commercial that shows some woman buying a computer for video editing for less that 2 grand. What is she going to use to capture and edit video? Adobe's Premiere costs almost 2k.. iMovie is free, and is more than enough for 95% of home users. Need more features? Final Cut Express is subsidized, $99. Want to spend a shit load of money? get the full final cut package, it will cost the same amount as Premiere Pro.

I have never bought a mac. I have a retail license for windows xp pro that cost $150. I did this because, at the time, there was more open source video encoding software availible on Win32.

However, I will never upgrade to Vista, and will likely never upgrade to Windows 7. Linux desktops are mature enough for everyday use, especially since 95% of poeple ONLY use their web browsers (my sister-in-law has used her computer for 12 months and has not created a single document).

Need a document? Open Office is okay (not great), and works on Win32, Mac, and Linux. Open Office Base works very well.

Summary: most users would be better off with the closed hardware and subsidized software that comes with mac. Nerds should be using Linux 100% of the time. Microsoft should be severely punished for their OS blunders (home users chose them only because it is the de facto standard in busness, but the majority of businesses are still using XP, two years after Vista's introduction, so there is NO reason for home users to use Vista.)

Man, there's some heated back and forth here... that's for sure.

Mac vs PC for Me?

PC:

Pros
* WAY cheaper hardware, seriously. My house was robbed recently, and my laptop stolen. This was a 3 years old Dell Inspiron that was about 2Grand (AUS) at the time of purchase. To replace that with a Dell Inspiron that's way better specced now...? $AU745 To replace with an Apple with a similar size screen (I don't want anything less than 14" it gets used as a DVD player for the kids in the car when we go on holidays)? $2,700! Seriously insane! The cheapest laptop they offer AT ALL? $1600, with a 13" screen... Holy crud. You can argue all you like about build quality and included features etc. etc. But if you don't offer some damn sort of entry level computers, then you've lost me I'm afraid.

* Games. I like to play PC Games, playing through Bioshock was blissful. I hardly ever get to these day (4 kids under 6 will do that to you), but I like to buy a game every six months or so and get some playing in now and again... and I'm afraid the PC has the Mac beat in every possible way here.

* I actually really like Windows Media Player. I didn't for ages. Up until, erm, I think it was version 10, I was a staunch Winamp user. But now, WMP is great. And I have no idea what you're talking about with ads in it, because I never see any, it opens in my library. But then I guess I never use online music stores as I'm old fashioned and actually like to get a physical CD for my music.

* It's what I'm used to... I've been using PCs since DOS, so I'm kinda comfortable with them, and I have no real issue with them or Windows. Is it a crap reason to stick with an operating system? Maybe... but it's a reason.

* Even moreso... It's what the Wife is used to: She really doesn't want to learn some other operating system. And she uses all the pcs in this house, so that's a serious consideration.

Cons
* Lack of a unix based terminal... yup, agree there. When you're doing web based development, and the things you're doing are deployed on Linux boxes, it would be really nice to be able to have a local setup that mirrors that. Can't really on a Windows box (and no, Cygwin doesn't count).

* Windows Movie Maker/ Windows DVD Maker: When I first got Vista I got really excited about Windows DVD Maker because the look and feel of the menus it can create and the way it all seems to fit together looks superb. After having it now for a year and a half or so, I think I have successfully burnt ONE DVD using it. ONE. And it's not like it tells you beforehand that it can't handle whatever video format you've given it or whatever, it quite happily previews and goes ahead and spends an hour preparing the video etc. only to die at 99% with a cryptic message. UTTER SHIT. And Movie Maker? Urgh, doesn't really output into any format I really want. I have used it, I have made some nice movies with it, but it's not fun to use at all. For my DVD creation needs I now use DVD Flick (Open source), and I have yet to hit any video format it can't handle... see MS, it's not that hard.


APPLE:
Pros
* Built on BSD: Having a real terminal, and real linux/unix operating system under the hood is great for anyone doing dev work... very nice.

* iLife: As much as I don't like iTunes (see below), from what I've played with in iMovie and iDVD, I really like them, very nice to use. Would love to be able to play with them, and it most of the reason I would like to give owning a Mac a go.


Cons
* Cost: Insane... mentioned above... unavoidable.

* The strip thing: Sorry, don't like that thing along the bottom... heaps of icons with only a tiny little triangle to let you know which ones are currently running, and which aren't. Not intuitive to me at all... but that might just be me.

* Lack of games... again, mentioned above.

* The incredibly annoying advertising: Seriously, this is enough to make me not want one. The arrogant, bullshit of 'Windows always crash' and 'Macs never fail' is SUCH SHIT. I can't remember the last time I had a windows box crash, and I use them ALL day most days. Whereas the last time I was using a Mac at work (OSX, but a fews years back) I had it crash with the delightful bomb thing...

* During that same time I was using the Mac I wanted to eject the DVD I had in it... I looked and looked for an eject button, and could not find it. Could find no logical way to do so... ended up dragging it onto the rubbish bin to eject it, which to me seemed like an insanely loopy way to get a disc out of a drive. I'm sure there are simpler ways, but I found it baffling that here I was, using the 'so simple' OS and could not for the life of me work out how to GET A DISC OUT OF THE MACHINE.

* I despise iTunes and Quicktime. The interface to iTunes, to my eye, is ugly as sin, and quicktime on the PC (can't speak for OSX obviously, but if you want to win people over, don't release shit software on other systems) is a horrendous piece of software that irks the absolute hell out of me... plus until recently had the gall to try and charge you money just to be able to watch movies full screen. I wouldn't have it installed on my pc at all if it wasn't for apple.com/trailers.

* Hardware upgrades: Sort of linked to the price thing, but different in that you can't throw any old video card or whatever else you want in the machine, because you're limited to what Apple offer you in their infinite wisdom.

Neither here nor there
* Physical design: People rant and rave about how beautiful Apples are... and to some degree they are very nice to look at, but you're kinda stuck with that and nothing else. PCs have some pretty sexy desktops and laptops now, in a form for pretty much everyone.


It is obviously personal, and for people like budzos to attack dag for dag finding Macs to be more productive for him is insane. If HE finds it more efficient, then that's friggen great! I really would love to give a Mac a chance, but that entry price is just insanely high, so I'm afraid, unless work switches to Mac (very much a Dell shop), it's not going to happen.