Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Apple Gives iPhone Designers Bonuses Up to $400K to Counter OpenAI Poaching
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
transpo1
macrumors 68000
I can see this happening, too. But the onus is on OpenAI and Jony Ive to deliver something people want but haven’t imagined yet.
And you better believe Apple is watching and they’re not going to just be idle spectators. That’s why we hear about rumors of them working on AirPods Pro with cameras, a pin, eyeglasses, etc.
Interesting to hear this. With a significant number of employees leaving Apple, this might be the only thing Apple can do.
garranhado
macrumors regular
Yes today developers are bad, really bad.
Recent bad software quality show that.
And yes someones are lucky incompetents.
Let them go away and hire others,
they certainly won't do a worse job.
CATiNTHESTORE
macrumors 6502a
I dunno. Apple has a history of adopting respected 3rd party technology in their products. Mach, FreeBSD, CUPS, and KHTML come readily to mind. When Apple wanted to build silicon they licensed ARM. I don't see licensing and adapting the Gemini model is any different.
Running on Google Cloud infrastructure is a no-brainer. Anthropic is making noises about leasing 1,000,000 Google TPUs, something that Google Cloud is capable of even with Gemini's own hundreds of thousands of TPU deployed. I know we're all jaded but think for a minute how much hardware that is[*]. Very few entities are capable of deploying and managing this sheer volume of infrastructure and you don't hire the people who can figure this stuff out off the street.
A decade ago MR had endless discussions about how Apple should get into the search business instead of outsourcing. With the benefit of hindsight we see that search is not the value proposition it might have seemed then. Perhaps a decade hence we'll look back at what we call AI today and laud Apple for sticking to their core competencies.
[*] The fastest time recognized for counting to a million out loud is 89 days.
I just had this idea that I genuinely think is a good idea, though I realize it will be dependent upon color preferences of course. I love the orange iPhone color and am only recently getting back into the Apple ecosystem recently with an M5 Apple Vision Pro purchase. I am just watching Apple TV for the first time and notice apple has a presence in F1. Soon...
Apple should collaborate with Mclaren and stick with orange for their next iPhone or a special collaboration in a match to Papaya Spark which is their F1 color. It truly is one of the most beautiful colors and has a depth of orange and pearl which views incredibly in many lighting conditions. I think Apple should continue to lean into the F1 arena while also investing in the immersive sporting experiences. I would be happy to even waive the designer retention fee I am reading about since I am such a kind person (and not a designer of anything)!
Apple should collaborate with Mclaren and stick with orange for their next iPhone or a special collaboration in a match to Papaya Spark which is their F1 color. It truly is one of the most beautiful colors and has a depth of orange and pearl which views incredibly in many lighting conditions. I think Apple should continue to lean into the F1 arena while also investing in the immersive sporting experiences. I would be happy to even waive the designer retention fee I am reading about since I am such a kind person (and not a designer of anything)!
Westside guy
macrumors 604
I disagree.
Not with Apple not having to do these things, but your reasoning. Search has been the backbone of Google, and it is the world's third most valuable company. Like Apple, they are making tons of money - so the value proposition has obviously been good. I think something similar will happen with AI - it is really useful to many of my tasks, and makes me more productive. And it seems to get better.
However, those things don't need Apple to do them just as they didn't have to do search themselves. It might have left money on the table, but let Apple focus on other things which also earned money. A similar thing might happen with AI
- if Apple integrates properly with various AI platforms, their products can gain a lot of the benefits without Apple having to invest. It doesn't give Apple the possibility to differentiate their products, but it also reduces their risk. And the customer can just select Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT etc.
Of course, as assistants gets better people will laugh even more at how terrible Siri is and its stagnancy for more than a decade - and that association might hurt Apple quite a bit. So ignoring it would not be a good option.
Last edited:
You read those Ive interviews good, didn’t you? Now repeating all that marketing blah blah. Look how people use their phones, they want tapping, they want screens (even a hologram would be nothing more than a screen), they mostly don’t want to talk.
The wheel was invented a long time ago and people still use that technology. There is nothing major to develop anymore. No need to reinvent the wheel. Same goes for smartphones.
There will be only be more improvements, that’s all there is to do.
It’s up to the users how “disturbing” they allow their phone to be.
And even if we developed some kind of magic “presence”, it’d still be disturbing because it is a presence.
I love how it’s taken Apple an entire year of losing talent to start trying to retain people.
Apple gave its iPhone Product Design team bonuses worth "several hundred thousand dollars" in an effort to keep them from being poached by other companies, reports Bloomberg. The bonuses were provided as restricted stock units (RSUs) that will vest over a four-year period.
Hardware designers given bonuses will need to stay with Apple to get the full value of the stock award, which can range from $200,000 to $400,000 or even more depending on how Apple stock does over the next several years.
Apple executives are concerned with the number of engineers the company has been losing to rivals like OpenAI. Several former Apple designers are now working on hardware products at OpenAI, including former Apple design chief Jony Ive. OpenAI has been recruiting Apple engineers that worked on the iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and Vision Pro, and it has hired over 40 former Apple employees.
In 2021 and 2022, Apple also handed out stock bonuses to engineers in silicon design, hardware, software, and operations to thwart poaching and increase employee retention.
Article Link: Apple Gives iPhone Designers Bonuses Up to $400K to Counter OpenAI Poaching
Funny thing is though if Open AI keep going they way they’re going, they won’t exist in a year.
So Apple could have waited it out 😂
Antilogical
macrumors newbie
I love how it's described as "poaching". As if people shouldn't be rewarded for their talent.
If Apple, or any other company, wants to keep people they consider valuable around, they should have to pay that privilege.
If Apple, or any other company, wants to keep people they consider valuable around, they should have to pay that privilege.
Yeah, at some point it becomes the weight of corporate bureaucracy and/or mgmt incompetence that will prompt employees to leave. I’ve been there and judging by the severe lack of innovation at Apple, despite spending 20x more on R&D than when Steve was alive (let that sink in), many employees are definitely leaving for reasons other than just money.
I don’t want to imagine a world where people are asking their dumb google questions to a chat bot over there air.
The general public are already awful enough with their obnoxious speakerphones and loud private conversations in public spaces.
Child, please!
The_Gream
macrumors 6502
So this. So many people keep saying ’Steve, would do this or not do that’. We don’t know. He is dead.
People also need to remember, Steve let Sir Johnny, push form over function for a lot of years. It wasn’t tell Johnny was gone that we started to get function back. IMHO, the form on most of the new hardware doesn’t look that bad. Still better than any window pc I have ever seen.
Sure, losing talent sucks, but any lose of talent is generally a poor management issue. This is not a Tim Cook issue a bad CEO, because most of those employees that have left probably have a number of leaders between them and Cook.
I left my last job, cause of how spineless my direct management was to the corporate people. Work conditions kept getting worse and worse and all the management would do was give us excuses.
Edit: going to add some additional info.
My last job, the previous owners had bonuses for everyone, based on attendance and company performance. They sold, and the new owner’s management team over the part of the company I worked for gave the impression that we should be grateful that we have a job. They didn’t do bonuses. They refused to hire more help, “cause the work load would slow down at some point” (we were working 50-60 hrs a week, for 9 plus months.)
It has been proven through out time, if a business takes care of their employees, those employees will take care of their employer, but you as a business can’t run on the ‘good old boy’ system ether. If someone is in management and shouldn’t be there, ether replace them or demote them.
Last edited:
Nowadays nobody lasts tons of years in a company. The most important thing is having a great vision, culture and labor conditions
HazeAndHahmahneez
macrumors 6502a
400k doesn’t sound like nearly enough…wasn’t mark and them giving like at least a rock in incentives? Half a rock sounds paltry by comparison…
Parowdy
macrumors 68000
Parowdy
macrumors 68000
Siri with ChatGPT on my iPhone 15 Pro is actually far superior to Gemini, Google Assistant and Bixby on my GF‘s Samsung Flip. She has to use Bixby for system stuff including pausing music.
These are very small grants. Sr - pe engineers at top tech get rsu grants well into 7 figures
Not sure how much retention these really offer.
Not sure how much retention these really offer.
scrapesleon
macrumors 68000
