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Apple Finally Signs A Big Deal With a Hollywood Movie Studio (washingtonpost.com)
"And the winner of the 2021 Academy Award for best picture is .â.â. Apple?" jokes the Washington Post, noting that Apple has just signed a new multi-year movie deal with film production company A24, "and while that seems like a comparatively minor announcement, it could change the game in some significant ways."
It's sneakily consequential. A24, if you're not familiar, is the boutique New York outfit that has been responsible for a slew of hipster-approved, Academy Award-recognized films including "Lady Bird," "Moonlight" and "Room." Since its founding six years ago by a trio that includes the former partner of late Beastie Boy Adam Yauch, it has located commercial success and downtown cool. Its movies are handmade hipster-fests that also often manage to please audiences: In addition to its big three, they include "Hereditary," "Eighth Grade," "A Ghost Story" and "Ex Machina". Welcome to the party, Tim Cook....
For Apple, cachet is everything. And it needs that now. A company that has prided itself on cool has reason to be worried about sustaining that on the entertainment side, with Netflix swiping its video lunch and Spotify some of its music swagger.
That with major competitors like Amazon already producing its own films, Apple, "had to do something..." They add the Apple's announcement "contained about as many details as the iPhone 7 has headphone jacks."
But "Even without those specifics, the significance was clear. Apple is installing itself as a producer of some of the most-acclaimed films around, all without needing to take a single meeting or read one script off the slush pile first...."
For Apple, cachet is everything. And it needs that now. A company that has prided itself on cool has reason to be worried about sustaining that on the entertainment side, with Netflix swiping its video lunch and Spotify some of its music swagger.
That with major competitors like Amazon already producing its own films, Apple, "had to do something..." They add the Apple's announcement "contained about as many details as the iPhone 7 has headphone jacks."
But "Even without those specifics, the significance was clear. Apple is installing itself as a producer of some of the most-acclaimed films around, all without needing to take a single meeting or read one script off the slush pile first...."
Macs are used heavily in the video and audio production industries. Apple started off catering to artists*, so they work to make sure OS X fully supports color profiles (the Macbook Pro screens are even color-calibrated at the factory). Unlike Windows which still has a color profile bug dating back to Vista (a UAC elevation popup which dims your desktop will dump the current color profile). And OS X is based on Unix so doesn't suffer as many audio dropouts as Windows used to, making it the preferred platform for sound sampling. So Macs tend to be overrepresented in what these people produce - movies, videos, DJing. When a scene calls for a laptop, these people will usually just grab whatever is most easily available, which is usually a Macbook.
Apple also offers its products for free for use in movies. They take em back after, but it helps if your production's prop budget is limited.
If you walk into any other business, 99% of their computers run Windows. That said, OS X has managed to claw above 10% market share in recent years.
* This is also why Macs got high-PPI "retina" screens first. Page layout artists also predominantly use Macs. Subpixel rendering, which basically triples the horizontal resolution without requiring new hardware, was introduced with Windows XP (ClearType). So Windows didn't need high-PPI to produce high-quality fonts. But subpixel rendering requires you to align the fonts to the subpixel grid. That's unacceptable for page layout work, where having the font appear where it'll actually appear when printed is more important than how sharp it looks on the screen. Consequently, OS X didn't use subpixel rendering (If you plugged a 1024x768 or 1280x800 monitor into a Windows PC, then a Mac, the Windows PC was noticeably sharper). OS X fonts are blurrier, but they're placed more accurately for page layout artists. The only recourse Apple had was to sharpen fonts was to switch to high-PPI displays.
.â.â.
How many years is it now?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.