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I use Keynote to make my presentations, and one time I wanted to build a presentation with someone else. I asked my friend who has worked at Apple for 20 years

• galad87 2y ago
  That's a weird answer, Keynote can shares presentations, and multiple people can work on the same presentation in real-time, either on the macOS/iOS or the web version. The feature has been available for years: https://support.apple.com/en-us/guide/keynote/tan4e89e275c/mac https://support.apple.com/en-us/guide/keynote/tan4e89e275c/m...
  • jedberg 2y ago
    > Note: Not all Keynote features are available for a shared presentation. That's the main issue. But also this happened about six years ago.
    • galad87 2y ago
      The collaboration features were introduced in 2013 on the web version, and in 2016 on the native versions. And maybe check which features are actually not available before dismissing it.
      • rad_gruchalski 2y ago
        Maybe the person who the op was talking about doesn’t work on Keynote and … secrecy … they missed the memo?
        • LoganDark 2y ago
          What memo? :)
    • jbverschoor 2y ago
      Six years ago Keynote supported simultaneous editing through share with iCloud
      • gorfian_robot 2y ago
        yeah, that's where all the top level production places want to store their pre release.
        • ezfe 2y ago
          They say that iCloud is end to end encrypted so…
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • cptskippy 2y ago
    > To collaborate on a shared presentation, people you share with need any of the following: > > A Mac with macOS 14.0 or later and Keynote 14.3 or later > > An iPhone with iOS 17.0 or later and Keynote 14.3 or later > > An iPad with iPadOS 17.0 or later and Keynote 14.3 or later Those OSes were released around June of 2023, so a little over a year?
    • dcrazy 2y ago
      The documentation always refers to the current versions of the software, and the latest version of iWork always requires being on latest or near-latest OS. Collaboration also requires all clients to be on the latest version of the software.
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  • mort96 2y ago
    [flagged]
    • Andrex 2y ago
      Then the question becomes why raise this irrelevant anecdote? The OP didn't research either.
      • jahsome 2y ago
        The anecdote is both relevant and interesting, even if a little dated. I think it's kinda bizarre to accuse someone of not "researching" their own recollections. How would one accomplish that?
        • jeromegv 2y ago
          Well the issue is that stories from “friends of friends” tend to get super unreliable very fast. Unless someone is coming on the record as having been employed themselves, stories from friends are almost always a lot of BS.
          • jahsome 2y ago
            Which is likely why it's clearly introduced as an anecdote and not a fact.
• ghaff 2y ago
  Huh. At my last company, probably less so presentation collaboration (in my case, less though still some if I were co-presenting) but shared documents with editors and so forth were huge. Better built-in workflows would have been nice ut it worked well enough with a bit of discipline, e.g. once you do a handoff you (mostly) don't make further changes unless you noting a typo or something.
• spacedcowboy 2y ago
  Wut ? Keynote works just fine with multiple simultaneous users. I work at Apple (for now) and do it all the time with managers/EPMs etc.
  • jedberg 2y ago
    This was about six years ago.
    • jbverschoor 2y ago
      Was working like that six years ago
    • threeseed 2y ago
      I worked at Apple over a decade ago and no idea what OP is talking about. There is plenty of collaboration in the company but it's typically constrained to the current project you're working on. And working in enterprise companies today it is no different.
• jc__denton 2y ago
  I seem to recall an anecdote from a colleague that interviewed with one of Apple's security teams. The actual room where the interview took place was locked from the outside and you had to use a badge reader on the inside to leave. I guess they didn't want folks wandering if someone needed to make a restroom break, but I can't help but wonder about issues like, say, a fire...
  • astrange 2y ago
    Presumably it unlocks if there's a fire alarm. The security team aren't more powerful than the fire marshal.
    • abenga 2y ago
      Presumably. We wouldn't know until it's too late.
      • PaulHoule 2y ago
        A few times in my life I really had to get through a locked door and asked myself "What would Kojak do?" and always got through with at most three kicks.
        • throwaway173738 2y ago
          I just go up and over through the drop ceiling.
        • DonHopkins 2y ago
          It took Milchick a lot more kicks than that to get out of the bathroom!
    • JoshTriplett 2y ago
      One wonders how well that is tested, as well as what happens if a fire goes detected, or if someone's badge stops working, or if there are technical difficulties with the badge reader or its infrastructure... There are far too many things that can go wrong with such a setup.
• aschobel 2y ago
  I've been working at Apple for almost 12 years. While secrecy is indeed paramount, once a tool is internally blessed, we collaborate normally using it. Keynote collaboration is actually pretty standard nowadays. Opinions are my own and do not reflect those of my employer.
  • DidYaWipe 2y ago
    Not to mention that blanket statements about Apple are absurd. I was a developer there for a decade, and every group was different. I love reading articles that purport to tell the public how things at Apple work. They're almost always laughably full of shit.
    • ipaddr 2y ago
      Didn't the article say some floors require keys for different offices and sometimes filing cabinets. That implies every floor is different which matches what you are saying. Most of the stories that have come out felt like they were the image Apple wanted to give. It started with Apple going after missing iphone that was left at a bar. We've heard those working on latest design for the next iphone were sequestered away from the rest of the company. I've always thought it was marketing spin and I'm glad we have an ex-apple employee confirming this. Back in the 'Lisa' days Apple did split and silo divisions, Apple did closely guard new iPhone designs with very few leaks happening but the rest of the mythology is more marketing.
      • blackguardx 2y ago
        I think you are drawing the wrong conclusions here. I have never worked at Apple, but know many people that have. Every team is different but the overarching theme is that they are very secretive internally, especially around hardware. They are so secretive that someone I know was working on a project that their own manager wasn’t allowed to know about.
        • owl57 2y ago
          Was it like a temporary assignment to another team? Did the manager at least know what team that was? Or have any idea when the employee is going to return full-time to the tasks of their primary team?
• mattl 2y ago
  Keynote and Numbers are interesting apps. Both are designed to replicate the same functionality as Concurrence and Quantrix (itself a clone of Lotus Improv) both by Lighthouse Design, who made lots of apps for NeXTSTEP and were purchased by Sun. Steve Jobs used Concurrence on a ThinkPad and also a Toshiba laptop to make presentations prior to Keynote (which I believe was created internally for him at first) even while back at Apple.
• nerevarthelame 2y ago
  I wouldn't be surprised if their attitude toward remote collaboration probably changed pretty significantly around 5 years ago. But fair enough that it may not yet be a primary consideration in all of their software.
• jjcm 2y ago
  Obviously a huge bias here (I work for Figma), but it’s one of my favorite things about Figma Slides. The product still has a ways to go, but man being able to actually be collaborative and not feel like you’re fighting against the software is a game changer. Video is a harder game due to the processing and data requirements, but I know that there are a lot of startups trying to make it collaborative first. I’m really excited for that to be the default.
  • SSLy 2y ago
    A lot video work can be done on proxies that any M-equipped device should be able to process a dozen or so without breaking a sweat.
    • nrclark 2y ago
      A quick note on this for non-editing folks: in context, a "proxy" here is a low-res version of your actual footage. It's common to use them while editing a cut together, and then to replace them with the full-res versions at the very end.
• rcarmo 2y ago
  Apple is not like that anymore. Well, not where it concerns remote tools and cloud use.
• mhh__ 2y ago
  Isn't it also true that Apple have dozens of different scm / developer platforms scattered around the company? e.g. some teams use gitlab, others phabricator etc etc
  • mattl 2y ago
    I think so as I just saw this on their jobs website: > We are seeking an experienced Software Architect specialized in source control systems to join our dynamic team. The ideal candidate will have expertise in designing, implementing, and managing systems like GitHub, GitLab, Perforce, Bitbucket, and Artifactory.
  • threeseed 2y ago
    Almost certainly yes because Apple acquires a lot of companies. Many of which take time to be migrated into the mothership.
• js2 2y ago
  > I knew this happened pre-COVID, but it was actually in 2013. Real-time collaboration was added in Keynote 7.0 released in Sept 2016. https://www.macworld.com/article/228811/keynote-pages-and-numbers-now-support-real-time-collaboration-across-mac-and-ios.html https://www.macworld.com/article/228811/keynote-pages-and-nu...
• carlmr 2y ago
  >Apple is famously closed about information sharing, to the point where on some floors every office requires its own badge, and sometimes even the cabinets within. The severed floor.
  • eschaton 2y ago
    “Severance” is exactly how Apple’s New Product Security and Public Relations organizations would like all employees to be, to an absolute T. However, the rest of the company is much more pragmatic and understands well the value of collaboration and employees having enriched lives that they share with the workplace, since that leads to greater innovation and works well as a recruiting tool as well.
• eschaton 2y ago
  They were BSing you or working in a different part of the company than SWE. Back in the day Keynote files would just be passed around via a shared server so you and the people you were collaborating with could make and merge changes between them, eg I’d do one part of a presentation, Rick would do another part, and we’d copy our slides out of and paste them into each others’ decks to get a complete version for rehearsing with. If we had notes for each other, we’d give each other the notes out of hand rather than just directly change each others’ slides. There’s a lot of mythology that people just make up about how secrecy works at Apple. It’s mostly sensible.
• llm_nerd 2y ago
  >So it doesn't surprise me that their video editing tools are designed for a single user at a time. The editors of Severance are actually using Avid. For music composition they're using Albeton. Neither are Apple products. The remote desktop product they're using is Jump Desktop. While the show is an Apple TV+ show, and they happen to use to Macs in the process, this has shockingly little to do with Apple tools or products.
  • sinoue 2y ago
    Good point. No Final Cut. No Logic Pro. Apple & Adobe are missing out.
• ksec 2y ago
  >but it was actually in 2013, 12 years ago. I didn't think it was that long ago. I know some people will say this is because of age. But I want to suggest I often thought of COVID years 2019 to 2023s as a single year / event. For reasons I cant quite fathom. So when I think of 2015 it would only be like a 2023-2019, 2018, 2017, 2016. So around 4-5 years ago.
  • blacklion 2y ago
    You are not alone.
• 486sx33 2y ago
  “A guy that I talked to 12 years ago that worked at Apple.” I’m reminded of my friend in grade school that had “an uncle that worked at Nintendo”. Not saying he didn’t, but just because someone works there doesn’t mean they know what’s going on.
  • bigyabai 2y ago
    Except "uncle that works at Nintendo" is a meme because Nintendo of America is a small business doesn't develop almost anything, whereas "friend that works at Apple" is less unreasonable for an American tech worker forum to purport.
• JKCalhoun 2y ago
  > We don't collaborate at Apple because of the (perceived) risk of leaks. That sentence, by itself, is more or less correct (from my 26 years at Apple). However, it suggests/implies things that are not correct. 1) In case you got the impression: Apple certainly does not design software to be non-collaborative simply because it would enable sharing/leaking when used within Apple. I would say that Apple has been focused since Day 1 on a mindset where one-computer equals one-user. The mindset was that way really until Jobs was fired, discovered UNIX, and then returned with Log In and Permissions. To this day though I think collaboration is often an afterthought. So too do they seem to be focused on the singular creative. I suspect Google's push into Web-based (and collaborative) productivity apps (Google Docs, etc.) forced Apple's hand in that department — forced Apple to push collaborative features in their productivity suite. 2) Of course Apple collaborates internally. But to be sure it is based on need-to-know. No one on the hardware team is going to give an open preso in an Apple lunchroom on their hardware roadmap. But you can bet there are private meetings with leads from the Kernel Team on that very roadmap. That internal secrecy, where engineers from different teams could no longer just hang out in the cafeteria and chat about what they were working on went away when Jobs came back. It probably goes without saying it was rigorously enforced when the iPhone was a twinkle in Apple's eye. The internal secrecy was sold to employees as preserving the "surprise and delight" when a product is finally unveiled but at the same time, as Apple moved to the top of the S&P500, there were a lot of outsiders that very definitely wanted to know Apple's plans. 3) Lastly, yes, plenty of floors and wings of buildings are accessible only with those with the correct badge permissions. I could not, for example, as an engineer badge in to the Design floor. Individual cabinets needing badge access? I have no idea about that. I am aware of employees hanging black curtains in their office windows when secret hardware would come out of their (key-locked) drawers. (On a floor that is locked down to only those disclosed, obviously the black curtains become unnecessary.)
  • daniel_reetz 2y ago
    This matches my experience. In addition I was advised/strongly encouraged to "go dark" on social media and refrain from ever discussing work at lunch, even with teammates. My badge only worked where I had explicitly been given access, and desks were to be kept clear and all prototypes or hardware had to be locked in drawers and/or covered with black cloths. Almost every door was a blind door with a second door inside, so that if the outer one opened, it was not possible to see into the inner space.
• dagmx 2y ago
  Apple is famously a company that encourages cross functional collaboration, as anyone who’s ever interviewed there could attest to, or known more than your friend. They’re secretive yes, but also collaborative. You can even read any accounts of famous shipped products to back up that cross functional collaboration has been their culture for many decades. Jobs mentioned it many times, and many articles have been written about it. Additionally keynote (and the entire iWorks suite) has had collaborative editing for years now. I suspect your friend is likely misinformed or not reliable?
• Thorrez 2y ago
  The article isn't about Apple lagging on collaboration. The article is about Apple lagging on virtual desktop infrastructure.