A single job posting for an engagement team doesn't really tell you if its a company strategy or not.
Directors hire on random ideas all the time and then pivot as needed
>A single job posting for an engagement team
A single job posting for an engagement team in Poland.
A person from Poland here: why does the country matter here? What are the implications you're implying?
I'm not the person you asked, but I don't think where it is matters as much as where it isn't. It isn't at Apples headquarters.
I don’t think the author meant it as an insult to Poland.
Apple is unusually centralized (they don’t even have different business units; the company has a single balance sheet at P&L) and corporate level decision making is pretty much all done by the same small team at the mother ship.
So while all sorts of decisions are made locally, a hire outside Cupertino (which all of Poland happens to be) is extremely unlikely to signal a corporate shift.
Even a job ad for a role in Los Angeles would be equally unlikely to signal such a shift.
It's a long way from their headquarters, a massive time zone difference at least. I don't think they're working on something that needs the direct attention of leadership.
> This role is based in our new office in Bielsko-Biala, Poland.
Out of all the places in Poland, this choice is pretty strange. :)
Apple’s head office for all of Europe is located in Cork, Ireland. They are not averse to building offices in places you might not expect.
It’s not some “paper HQ” for tax purposes, either - they have over 6000 employees there and are easily the largest private employer in Cork.
It’s not a paper HQ, but it is for tax purposes.
Isn't it right next to the largest agglomeration in Poland? Also close to two (maybe three) other countries connected via highways?
True, but still, not the city one has in mind when thinking about tech companies in Poland.
I think the OP is trying to say if it was in Cupertino, it would be more of an event.
Just like Amazon posting for this position in Phoenix wouldn't be seen the same way as Seattle.
I disagree. It was relevant, succinct, and meant to inspire introspection leading to positive change.
It was unanimously downvoted and attracted community flags, which is why I saw it. Others found a way to respond with substance, whereas yours seemed like snark. I can understand you didn't mean it to be seen as a low-quality comment; few people do. But I'm bringing to your attention that I, and others in the community, read it as the kind of comment that is not the way we want to communicate here.
Bring. Back. Aperture!!! Yes there are alternative to Lightroom out there (Capture One, for example), but Aperture was so Mac native and was such a joy to use on OS X.
I much prefer the interface of Pixelmator and Pages to Photoshop and InDesign, and paying once (for the non-AI-augmented version of Pixelmator, which Apple indicate will continue to receive some manner of updates going forward) is a nice plus.
It’s unfortunate there’s not a real Illustrator equivalent; Pixelmator has okay enough vector editing and export support for my needs, but notably will render the canvas rasterized at whatever the nominal resolution is even when zoomed in editing an SVG. Vector exports work as expected, just the editing is rasterized. Still, a small price to pay for not paying monthly for Adobe’s mountain of crufty malware.
I feel like there had to have been some appetite within Apple to acquire serif (the Affinity suite of apps, Affinity Designer being a great Illustrator alternative) before Canva did because they were making non-kneecapped iPad apps, getting demos/mentions at Apple events, and just generally seeming like a good fit from the outside. (Other than being a non-Apple-technology cross-platform suite)
I can’t say that would’ve been a perfect outcome all things considered, but Apple certainly would’ve had a well rounded creative suite.
The Creator Studio is a pretty big miss for Apple. Pages, Numbers, and Keynote have always been productivity apps, not creativity apps (and there is a difference). Of the remaining apps, Pixelmator Pro is the only one that is remotely relevant to my needs, and I'm not subscribing to a $12.99/mo plan just for Pixelmator. Compared to $19.99/mo cost for a much more coherent set of Adobe photography and imagery tools, it's a no brainer to go with Adobe. Not the outcome I would prefer, but a bunch of audio and animation tools will be functionally useless to me, so I'm being asked to pay $12.99/mo for a photo editing app and some productivity tools I already have. I'm sure there are some people who will benefit from the breadth of the Apple bundle, but I don't expect there are THAT many.
The fact that it is impossible to get Pixelmator Pro outside the bundle just makes the situation more ridiculous, unless you want the legacy version.
Create serious pro/prosumer tools for creative verticals again (Aperture, you are dearly missed) and you'll have my attention.
It's not bad value at AUD$4.99 per month (education pricing). I only really use it for Final Cut Pro though.
Probably safer to assume that they always had someone serving in this position and they recently left.
Side note to author: the web renders really bad on mobile
Renders poorly on desktop too.
Also, the content is uninteresting on both.
It's a pity that Apple neglects its creative apps. I've been working on a video project using Motion recently, and while not as capable as After Effects, it's pretty serviceable and with some love could be excellent.
There’s no escaping that whatever money Apple makes from this will be a rounding error compared to iPhone / iOS revenue. I honestly think the apps would be better served to be sold to a smaller company where such revenue was a bigger piece of their pie and they were therefore incentivized to care about them.
There’s no escaping that whatever money Apple makes from this will be a rounding error compared to iPhone / iOS revenue.
I can't even imagine what it would be like to work in an Apple-sized rounding error.
Well it's a good thing they killed Aperture, then. Makes perfect sense.
(I was badly affected by that and decided not to trust them to maintain anything over the long term anymore)
Update: I now re-read the job posting and also realized that none of the responsibilities listed there are good for the users. This is bad news.
They released a bunch of apps for creatives last year. That was the signal, no?
They bundled existing apps in a subscription.
Why is this on front page HN? There is no concrete information here
That tells us nothing, nothingburger speculation. However, Apple had that major incident in its history when they made Adobe mad when they went out and shopped for final cut pro, color, and a handful of compositing apps. Didn't turn out well for Apple at the time.
Was that as mad as when Adobe didn't believe Apple when they said to switch to 64bit so they didn't because FCPStudio wasn't updated to 64bit only to have Apple release FCPX instead causing Adobe to miss an entire upgrade version on Mac? (you should read that run-on breathlessly as intended)
Yeah, we were all there when it happened. It was rich, to say the least lol.
Folks - don't work for Evil. Any startup or smaller
or even some medium-sized companies should be better
work-places than the big greedy corporations. Granted,
greed is an addiction and most people will fall to
whoever pays most (that's understandable), but think
of the ethics factor as well whenever the income is
considered. Working for Evil comes with a karma penalty;
Google taught us thus whenever an ad is infiltrating
your computer.
Really not interested in this one. There is no data portability as none of the file formats they use for anything are documented and they are shovelling you into an eternal subscription model. At least Adobe file formats are well documented and have importers on pretty everything else so you can escape if you need to. I can open illustrator and photoshop files in a load of other apps, including open source. Pixelmator and their office stuff, nope.
I’ve been in this trap before and I’m only interested in portable, documented, non subscription stuff.
I’ve moved to Darktable, Inkscape and libreoffice here mostly for my needs. I don’t really need photoshop equivalent.
this has nothing to do with creativity app users, and everything to do with enshittification -- locking features that used to be free behind a monthly subscription, and ensuring new features are not offered to owners, but rather only available through renting. it has nothing to do with competition either