zoetmb

fastasleep said:

lkrupp said:

With the tech giants and streaming services all producing content it’s going to generate more and more jobs in the movie business. Actors, directors, editors, all those names you see scrolling across the screen at the end of a movie will have a lot of work. A close friend’s daughter just graduated cum laude from USC with her degree in Cinematic Arts. We’re all hoping she finds good work in the industry. 

She'll find grueling, underpaying work for sure.

I think the impending strike (whether the strike itself actually happens or there's a negotiated settlement) is going to substantially change things   Union jobs in the industry used to pay extraordinarily well.   Back in the day, I was a recording engineer in an independent studio, but I got a call to work on a shoot for a series of TV commercials.   The shoot ran overtime and I made more in that one day than I normally made in a week.    And unlike current complaints about missed meals, we got paid extra for missed meals, but got to grab food from the craft table that was pretty good food anyway.   Because it ran over and I think it was a weekend, we went into what was called "Super Golden Time" pay.   And the job was nothing - I just had to wire up an announcer with a lavaliere and record audio onto a Nagara tape recorder.   If there was anything negative about the job, it's only that it was boring, whereas at the independent studio, I was doing highly creative work.  

All of the unions have voted to support a strike because current working conditions - 18 hour days, low pay, etc., are poor.    I believe that's going to change things and I think pay scales especially at the bottom are going to be vastly improved.     There's no reason why Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Hulu, etc. can't pay well when they produce directly and they should insure that people are paid and treated well even when they buy programs from independent producers or other studios (or the unions should insure this).   On union shoots, I'm surprised things have gotten so bad (if indeed they really have) because the union rule books are quite intense (and complex).   

What got leaked that the world didn’t already know about?   Apple makes incremental changes to the products each year.  New processor possibly aside, it doesn’t take rocket science to figure out what they’re probably going to do. 

Reaction to product updates (like on this site) has been pretty “meh” of late anyway, proving that there’s really not much of significance to leak. 

It seems to me that the guesses that the analysts and pundits take creates enough noise that the leaks don’t really matter because one doesn’t know which is accurate. 

Now if Apple was about to launch a new product line that we didn’t really have details about yet,  like an Apple robot or the Apple Car, I could understand wanting to maintain the highest level of secrecy before launch. But other than that, I have to question whether Apple’s obsession with security hurts them more than it helps them because of the internal lack of knowledge across groups that results. 

This in no way excuses the behavior of the employees who leaked. 

ravnorodom said:

China is dying to get any confidential data from TSMC for chip fabrication. They must’ve brided those employees. 

Not if the leaks were truly about customer orders.  

verne arase said:

geekmee said:

Regardless, we are overlooking the most important part of this report…

Once again, Apple has taken all the oxygen out of the room!!

I think that once the M1x Macs drop there will be a lot of sleepless nights for those manufacturers on the x86 side of the fence.

I was just watching an Intel ad on YouTube where some supposed creative was saying he gamed and created and needed a lot of graphics power which he couldn't get on a Mac <snicker>.

A lot of those ads just won't work any more, and I expect to see pretty amazing graphics performance - without the Wintel copying graphic workload overhead - as well as some impressive battery life.

I disagree regardless of the level of the new Macs performance.  Users lock into hardware brands the way they lock into a political party or religion.  Once they choose to believe something, they stick with it.  And a very large percentage of Wintel users are in offices where users don’t get to choose their own machines and where bulk buys of Dells or whatever are relatively economical. 

Macs are still perceived by many as overpriced and Apple long ago lost its reputation as “it just works”.  

If you think about what most  users do on their computers: email, social media, photo organization and maybe some post processing, and streaming, with a relatively few doing high intensity tasks, the performance granted by the new processors  isn’t needed by most, with the potential exception of better battery life. 

IMO, the new machines might get more people to upgrade their existing Macs sooner, but I don’t think they’re going to attract many converts.

Unfortunately, Mac sales are becoming an ever smaller minority of Apple’s overall business.  

JMO.  

You can’t take a large group of men and women and compare their average salaries and make any conclusions from that.  You have to compare people in equivalent jobs.  Even in that case, you have to analyze whether the difference between the salaries of men and women is more than the variance between just men and just women in similar positions. 

If a gap is found when non-equivalent positions are compared, it STILL doesn’t mean that women are underpaid.  It just means that there aren’t enough women in positions that happen to pay more.  That’s a problem, but a different problem. 

In the companies I worked at, the difference in salaries between Vice-Presidents regardless of gender was huge.  There were VP’s making $100K and VP’s making $250K.  This wasn’t about gender as much as it was about tenure, experience and value to the company.  

I would argue that only a 6% wage difference overall is probably quite remarkably good.