I saw what looked like iMovie running on an iMac.

I saw a DVD being placed into and being played back on an HP laptop.

Not much guessing.

There must have been 2 machines capable of burning DVDs.
- The tech guy said the capacity was 4 per hour.
- Liz presented Sandeesh with a maximum demand based on 8 per hour
- Team Sandeesh operated from 11am to 8pm - 9 hours
-Team Sandeesh sold 55 dvds.
Now if there were only one machine and it was only capable of burning 4 dvds per hour then the most they could have sold would be 36. Given they only really got into their stride after about 4pm when Liz did her espionage the total should be much lower.
To me the only logical explaination is that tech guy was referring to the burn rate per machine - it would also explain why the maths genius Liz used a figure of 8 when it was she who actually asked tech guy the question - why else would she have doubled it up?

No, the guessing and speculation come where you decide, off the top of your head, that the Windows machine was configured in some way that would not allow them to use it to burn DVD's.

This despite there being compelling evidence that they *did* burn more DVD's than would be possible with just one mac.

Compelling evidence?

Now who's speculating.

How could team Sandeesh sell 55 DVDs in 9 hours if they only had one machine which only produced 4 per hour?

They are using macs for the editing and thus transfer from tape. Once it's on a DVD it can be played back on any system. Although you can fit firewire ports to PC systems running any operating system within reason. And you would if you want to teather the camera to it.

The point is, the equipment required is supplied by a company specialising in this. They haven't cobbled together whatever machines were spare in the tv studios. And that takes no guessing

Liz wouldn't have calculated a max of 8 an hour if they had only one computer to use. I know people question the Apprentice candidates' intelligence on this forum continuously but I really think this isn't something one of them would mess up.

To anyone with one iota of mathematical ability if <number of disk that can be produced by one machine per hour> x < number of hours available> is less than <number of disks produced>, that is compelling evidence.

And that is the speed they go at or rather Christopher does.
Monkseal noted that the prog stated that up to 3pm they had only sold 8. In the next six hours they sell another 47, that's 7.8 per hour. The shopping centre closes at 9pm btw. Ok, maybe it was take the money for 8, but it won't be much higher. They have two burners. If they had sold like that earlier, then their 110 dvd's would have not been a mistake.

I was agreeing with you.

Yeah, I was agreeing with you Just backing it up with some numbers.

Oh OK.

Jamie was only being negative, so why put him on the sales team

Then again, it was a clear mistake to put monotone Chris on the sales team either (Christoper would probably have been better).

The team was just severely understaffed on sales people (basically only Liz, as Jamie was not in a selling mood), while the other team had Laura, Joanna and Stuart.

Jamie only went negative *after* he'd been told he wasn't going on the sales team. Up until that point, and in fact even afterwards, he was the one most positive about the Skiing idea and thought it would work.

One of the reasons why Skiing was the wrong choice was that the team seemed to forget that it wasn't just a product with no competition - Skiing (and esp indoor Skiing or Dry Slope skiing) would've had to compete with doing the actual activity. It's about £20 for an hour Skiing in Milton Keynes, and it's much cheaper for a session on a dry sky slope elsewhere so would you rather pay that and get a full hour out of it with your own camcorder to record or £12 for a 3 min fake DVD?

At least with the racing cars it's something that most people wont get the chance to try unless they pay a lot more (£50+ for driving sessions at Brands Hatch).

I've just been watching the Apprentice again and the expert does say the process would take 15 - 20 minutes per filming which does equate to 4 an hour.

It may take one person 15 minutes to shoot, process and burn the footage to DVD but does that estimate take into account one half of the team doing the filming whilst the other half processes the video and burns it to DVD?

Rather than assuming there was another totally unseen computer would it not make more sense that the time could be saved by doing more than one task at a time?

Team 1 could carry on shooting more footage whilst Team 2 processes it in the background.

Oh, good grief!

There was another computer.

You've just decided, for reasons of your own, that it wasn't configured in such a way that it could read tapes and burn DVD's.

No one else seems to have the slightest problem believing that the PC could do that and your own weird fixation seems to be based on nothing more logical than an initial (incorrect) assumption that you need mac software to do the job.

All of this is a complete red herring anyway. The initial question was whether or not Liz had completely messed up the estimate for the number of DVD's required.

Well if people want to delude themselves that a £500(ish) HP laptop can edit video as well as a £2k+ iMac then who am I to stop them.

(Toshiba laptops weren't that good at it when I used them for video editing.)

I think it's more to the point that you are, for some reason, deluding yourself into believing that you need to spend £2000+ to do something that you can do perfectly well on much cheaper equipment. (Although I'm sure Steve Jobs and his bank manager are thankful that there are people around with such delusions. )


So, the fact that some Toshiba laptop with some particular software was not much good at something at some unspecified point in the past is informing your judgement about what a completely different laptop running software about which you have no clue can do now?

For your information, macs now use exactly the same processors as PC's (and have done for some time) so there is no reason whatsoever that they should be in any way superior for computationally intensive tasks such as this.

According to the boardroom, they burned 55 DVDs, so far from being "on the high side" your figure would have left them short.

I'd have gone for 90, and expected that any wastage would be covered by not working at full capacity the whole time. Especially as mistakes would probably be discovered after the DVD was burned, and thus cut into the time as well as into the supply of DVDs. Despite that I can understand Liz wanting to round it up to 100. It seemed like Sandeesh who wanted 110; I think that was stupid but it only cost them another £5.


Excellent maths. It does sound like they were close to the 8 per hour maximum for 6 hours. Although 90 or 100 DVDs would still have been ample.


Part of the problem is that someone had to ferry the DVDs between locations. If not Jamie, than who?

Personally I think the PM should do it. That way you get to monitor both sub-teams and can trouble-shoot problems at either location. That's more or less what Jamie ended up doing. I suspect the PM doesn't make that choice because they see ferrying as a low status job.


I thought it was dismissed because it was too late to fix. What were they supposed to do, shut up shop, go home, change, return, start selling again?

I agree Jamie could see problems, but he wasn't very good at fixing them. Reducing the price was the wrong solution, for example: Liz's idea of switching to the racing video was the right one.

As far as being an Apple fanboy goes, I have been using Intel / Windows / MsDos platforms for almost 30 years, whereas I have only been using Mac for a coming up on year.

I can remember the first computer I laid my hands on was back in around 1980. It was a Research Machines 380z with twin 5.25" disks which belonged to the school.


In my past:

I looked after a Pr1me 2250 mini-computer, with 32 dumb terminals and a couple of associated Daisy Wheel printers, for about 3 years.

I administered a couple of Novell servers with about 30 Apricot, and other makes, of PC and associated printers (both dot matrix and laser) for about 6 years. Loaded software, even wrote a few small programs in assembler, and configured them. Even attempted a few repairs as well.

I was part of a PC helpdesk for around 3 years.

Been part of a team building front-end applications in Uniface against an Oracle database.

I designed & built MS Access databases for 11 years.

In my spare time I have dabbled in, amongst other things, video editing using, as I have said before:

Pinnacle Studio (Windows)
Roxio VideoWave (Windows)
Adobe Permier Pro (Windows)
iMovie (Mac)
Final Cut express (Mac)

So I think I know a little bit about it.

Oh sorry, I got carried away there. I thought I was on Jobserve.

All very impressive, I'm sure, but it does not mean that you can magically divine the specifications and configuration of devices just by looking at them on TV and then make dogmatic statements about what they can and cannot do.

Several people have already explained to you that they couldn't have produced even what they did with one computer and if either team had sold really well they would have been completely hamstrung if they could only use one machine to burn the DVD's.

You seem to be utterly intent on sticking to your purely speculative version of what their equipment could do when you have no way whatsoever of knowing what that was and any available evidence suggests you are wrong.

Well, it's my opinion and I'm sticking with it.

I think the ferrying was what Stuart was doing. Well don't see him selling, but we do see him in both places regularly. And to be fair he's probably doing it for the reasons you list.
Sandeesh should have done it, but I think she thought she'd be better at selling. Perhaps she was, I can see that she should be. Liz got a very positive edit that episode. I'd have put Chris in the backroom, Jamie and Liz sales, with the ferry job being Christopher or Sandeesh. Both the latter are safe to work with the public. It also make sense to have at least one who is in the video esp if they dressed up as a penguin and is a dad.

The skiing was the mistake as their target market (which I don't think they realised how young it would be) didn't really know what it was. If they had thought about it a bit more, who would get it, and then add stuff to appeal (like Santa, more penguins etc). Then dress up and stress the fun on snow aspect, the customers walking past would have understood the point better. But it's still a harder sell. The toy car works because the kids see it and want a go. They all know what it is. Don't think Stuart realised that until a mum told him. The editing shows it as a chance discovery in the shop, but they wouild have needed a car prop from the start.

Oddly enough some sort of pit stop gear seems to magically appear on Chris later (whom it suits). Where did that actually come from?? Jamie was right (as he often is at spotting smaller mistakes a bit late), dressing up acts as an advert. Draws kids too. All the other team did was put on angel wings, not much to do with driving a car that.

Someone had to do the running between the camera and the processing team. It couldn't be Sandeesh as PM or Liz who could sell well and the production team selected itself. I don't see much case for Jaimie selling over Chris. Jaimie just took umbrage at getting the runners job and that was Sandeesh's only chance of surviving if she had brought him back for it instead of Liz.

There was also more mileage, as the OP pointed out, in pursuing who had pushed the skiing idea - his Lordship might have been susceptible to that argument if it had been run back at him.

That makes sense. He had only 4 people on his team, so Laura and Joanna selling, Stella on production, and Stuart ferrying between locations.

That makes it even more likely that Stella make the original mistake with the DVDs, and Stuart was merely supposed to check them as he picked them up. (The mistake could also have been made at the other end, by someone stopping the recording too early or too late, but really I think Stella ought to have fixed it, or rejected the tape, when she was burning the DVD.)


As Tercet2 and I have been discussing, it could have been the PM, and probably should have been.