Executive Pay
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Apple's execs are not the best-paid
A report earlier this week from Businessweek claimed Apple has four of the five highest-paid employees among Standard & Poor's 500 companies. The figures cited in this report included both base salary and vested stock packages, which has some people, like Philip Elmer-DeWitt of Apple 2.0, crying foul. DeWitt open his acrid retort to the Businessweek article by asking whether "Bloomberg's brainiacs know the difference between an RSU and a pay check?" DeWitt points out that the compensation packages for Apple's top brass may have increased, but their pay has remained steady. These compensation packages include restricted stock units (RSU) that are not immediately available for the Apple executives and should not be counted as part of their pay. These RSUs are part of a retention package that becomes available after an employee works a set number of years. If the employee leaves before the RSUs have vested, then he or she loses that money. It's a common method used by companies to entice their employees to stay put for a while.
Rumor: New iPhone 4 handset at the end of September
Honestly, I don't even believe this one, but it's our responsibility as an Apple news site to keep you updated on the latest rumors, so here you go: A Mexican tech site is reporting that a Telcel executive says there will be a new version of the iPhone 4's handset released as soon as the end of September. Marco Quatorze, Telcel's Director of Value Added Services, says that the iPhone 4 will soon go on sale in Mexico with the same hardware as everywhere else, but that as of September 30th (which is purportedly when the free case deal ends), Apple will be releasing brand new hardware for the phone that will fix the seam in the outer band that causes reception issues. Anyone who's been paying attention to the issue knows that story's full of holes -- not only does Apple already consider the whole "Antennagate" issue solved, but it's extremely improbable that they'll update the hardware so soon and for that reason. It's much more likely that the company would just extend the free case program rather than update the hardware before the planned cycle. Plus, as we heard from Apple specificially, "Apple has not made an announcement regarding iPhone 4 pricing or availability in Mexico." Let's get the phone on sale before we start talking about updates.* It's possible that this is just an error in translation. If you want to get a little paranoid, we might even guess that Mr. Quatorze is trying to keep Mexican customers from buying another cellphone, hinting that there are better phones coming just around the corner. Either way, we're only posting this rumor here for due diligence -- it's extremely unlikely we'll see a new iPhone 4 in just over a month. *As noted in the comments here, on the iPhone 4 Mexico post and on Apple's own site, the iPhone 4 is available in Mexico, but Apple has yet to provide us with an actual statement to that effect. [via MacRumors]
Midway execs get rich while company crashes
While Midway collapses, the fabulous salaries of the executives who brought the company to its knees are coming under scrutiny. TGR has a great post up about the ridiculous compensation the higher-ups at Midway were receiving over the last couple of years -- right as hundreds of employees are set to lose their jobs.Let's see here -- former CEO David F. Zucker made $4.5 million over the past two years. Current VP Martin Spiess made a little over a half million in 2007, which is about the same amount current CEO Matt Booty also made. TGR puts it in perspective: if the average industry salary is about $50k, Zucker's take over the last two years "could have paid for all 180 of those workers [who lost their jobs] to be employed at full pay for another six months." That logic and math might be a little fuzzy, but it's always disheartening to see the ineffective executives make out like bandits.
