Welcome to 995 Mac Daily for Friday, March 27, 26.

I'm your host, Chance Miller.

We are sponsored this week by Backblaze.

Leading off today, a new report from Bloomberg details that Apple has awarded rare bonuses to iPhone hardware designers this week.

The bonuses are said to be worth several hundred thousand dollars and are viewed as a way to deter employees from departing for

higher-paying startups like OpenAI. The bonuses are out of cycle, which means they come

separate from Apple's typical scheduled bonuses for employees.

They are reportedly worth between $200,000 and $400,000 over the full vesting period.

They come in the form of stock units that vest over four years, so employees must stay at Apple for the

full four years to receive the full amount.

Employees see the pay bumps as a direct response to an uptick in recruiting from startups.

Still, the bonuses are a fraction of what OpenAI and others are offering.

In some cases, those companies are paying individual Apple engineers roughly $1 million in stock annually to jump ship.

One of the more notable departures from Apple in recent years was Tang Tan, who departed in 2023. Tan, who held the title of VP of Product Design at Apple, now works at OpenAI as the company's chief hardware officer.

That OpenAI group alone has poached, quote, several dozen engineers from Apple since

2003. Whether or not these out-of-cycle bonuses are enough to deter some employees from leaving

remains to be seen, but it's a rare example of Apple responding

to the market pressure. We are sponsored this week by Backblaze. Spring is when a lot of us

clean up our Macs. We delete old files, reorganize folders, but before you start deleting things,

you should always ask yourself if you have a full backup. On a Mac, ICloud

mostly syncs your files across devices, and Time Machine protects you locally with an external

drive. Backblaze adds automatic off-site protection. You install it once and it runs in the

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