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Recommend Apple, Lose Your Job?
rocketjam writes "While examining whether outsourcing tech work to India is really cost-effective, Robert X. Cringely takes a look at the old conspiracy theory that IT doesn't recommend Apple solutions because they need less support, thus endangering IT professionals' job security." Cringely argues: "Ideally, the IT department ought to recommend the best computer for the job, but more often than not, they recommend the best computer for the IT department's job."
The XServe, although not an x86 machine, can do everything you just said an x86 Linux box can do. Heck, if it becomes impractical to upgrade and you don't want OS X on it anymore, you can - well - install Linux on the thing.
NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
Sure you can upgrade the ram in an x-serve, or the processor. But at what price?
From Pricewatch: G4 1.2GHZ upgrade: $465
Athlon XP 2100: $61
So it's about $400 cheaper to upgrade the X86 box...
They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty nor security
MacOS-X has a CLI - a C shell running in an ANSI terminal.
It depends on the kind of engineering you're doing. There's a shortage of CAD packages for the Mac, for example, but with MacOS X, most of the major UNIX engineering packages have been ported to MacOS X -- the vendors see it as a dramatically easier way to get to the non-UNIX desktop market than doing an NT port. Some examples:
... you get the idea. Probably not as wide a range as for Wintel, but they've certainly got their fans (i.e. people using them to make a living).
You can find a good catalog of Mac app's at http://guide.apple.com/. A quick search turned up ArchiCAD, CADintosh, DesignWorks (circuit design/schematics), MacSchema, PowerCADD, VectorWorks, B2Spice (circuit emulator),
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
You'd be perfectly comfortable with a Mac, at least as far as the CLI goes. It's a unix (-based operating system, to please the open group). It behaves on the CLI like other unixes do (particularly FreeBSD).
And as for the rest, it's easy. Point and click isn't hard, and program interfaces are very similar across operating systems.
For to end yet again.
A Mac is considerably more expensive than a bottom-of-the-line, no-frills PC. (Or, worse, a "kit" PC that you assemble from parts.)
But when you compare apples to apples (heh), you see that Macs are quite price-comparable to mid-range or high-end PC's, feature for feature. On the very high end, Macs are actually significantly cheaper than PC's, apples to apples. Or rather they will be when the G5 starts shipping.
A lot of people make the mistake of looking at the cheapest Mac Apple sells and assuming it's a low-end computer. It's not. Don't make the same mistake of thinking that it is.
- Macs are not that expensive. What you get with a Mac makes up for slightly higher prices. They give you what you need without having to tack on lots of "extras."
- Macs can do everything you need. We use a mixed environment transparently. There is nothing I cannot do with a Mac that I want to do, nor am I prevented from interacting with Windows boxes or Linux boxes. It just works. Transparently.
- Macs don't waste your time. Every security update from Microsoft means the Windows guys are running around updating. The Mac guys just sit there and keep working. The Windows guys keep updating their virus software. The Mac guys just sit there and keep working. And although some people report problems with Apple hardware, and I respect those opinions since any hardware can go wrong, our uptime has been great.
As for the Linux guys, heh, they love Linux and take care of their boxes without any questions or issues coming up. Patch needed? They do it on their own time. Uptime? Forever. Problems? Nil.In short, don't believe those who say that you can't do things with Macs, or it causes problems interacting on the network, or the usual FUD. Although I'm sure there are specific instances where problems might occur on the edges, my real-world experience has shown that the Mac and Linux boxes are the ones that just work in my company. Any problems we have are with the Windows side. I can well believe that you need more IT staff to keep the Windows boxes going. There is very little you need to do to keep the alternatives going, and they interact just fine.
So if you love Window boxes, good for you. But if you hear the FUD about Macs not working well with others, I'm here to tell you that it's just not so.
I dont think the vast majority of tech support places do this. Ive been working in various industries as tech support and have always recommended what I thought was best for the customer, whatever I would recommend for my mother or would buy myself. To some, especially in the graphics industry I always recommend the macs, even if theyre using linux. For many others who wouldnt take the headache of linux configuration and smaller software base, I recommend windows 2000.
Some people in college where I worked as tech support did ask about buying a mac. I told them its very robust and they'll love its working, but they'll have issues with software and had better go with IBM or Dell. They took my advice. I similarly have a few Dells at home and no Mac yet.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
None of these products work on OS X, but they do work on Linux, OS400, OS390, W2K, Solaris.
Apple is good for a small-scale business, but not an enterprise-wide corporation. Like banks for instance. Most IBM products will not work on Macs, except the ViaVoice and Lotus Notes products (maybe a couple more too). But middleware, no way.
On top of that, have you ever worked on an XServe? It's a DREAM to deal with!
The thing is incredible, the way that it comes apart, and the ease with which you can change components is sooooo nice.
If I had to deal with upgrading/swapping components as part of my job, I'd LOVE to have a rack of XServes.
Not saying that other boxes aren't as easy/nice, but they tend to be the exception rather than the rule.
$0.02 (CDN)
Cringely argues: "Ideally, the IT department ought to recommend the best computer for the job, but more often than not, they recommend the best computer for the IT department's job."
:( )
;)
This person obviously sees only part of the bigger picture. Supporting the hardware/software is part of the total cost of ownership. If a company deems it a better deal to purchase PCs over cost of support issues, then they'll be picked. Not to mention, most users have a PC at home. Why burden them with learning a different platform at the office?
Bottom line, you can go buy a new PC motherboard, sound card, video card, etc for a few bucks. Replacing Apple parts are a bit more expensive and harder to come by.
If Apple had wanted a larger share of the office market, they should have been there to compete for it all these years. Nothing against them, but they focused almost entirely on the home user market and photoshop crowd for the past ten years, leaving PCs for the miscellanious work. You don't get your hardware stocked in offices by being innovative, you do it by being consistent and monopolistic.(
This isn't a blanket assumption that PCs are the better answer for all office situations, but those are the reasons none of my shops have been Apple shops.
Please don't get all zealoty and mod happy, just an honest opinion from an honest joe who's set up more office networks than most. My karma is still recovering from the last time I posted to a Mac thread.
NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
XServe might be nice but OS X Server is not. I've just spent the last few weeks upgrading OS X Server and migrating OS9 clients to OS X and it was pure hell. I could write an essay about all the troubles we experienced.
The OS X Server manual, first off, is pure crap. Information is missing and just crossreferences everywhere. But who needs a manual, right? The bundled server apps, like Workgroup Manager, is extremely buggy and crasches now and then. It also caused the entire Netinfo database to be corrupted. I had a backup of course, but it would load. I had the reinstall the entire server. Then halfway through we discovered undocumented missing feature. We wanted to use netboot without local disks as you can do fine on many unixes. OS X Server doesn't support this. You MUST use a local drive. And even nicer: once you have a working netboot disk image, there's no way you can upgrade it.
I think I'll stop here, there were many other strange bugs and missing features... finally got it to work after devious bootscript hacking and trial n errors.
I REALLY hope Apple makes a better job with Panther server. What they have now doesn't feel mac'ish at all. I love OS X (and apple generally), but OS X Server is really bad and can easily be replaced by Linux.
Ciryon
PS. Really tired, grammar nazis beat me.
What hardware we "nerd ego" bound IT types buy IS LARGELY NOT UNDER OUR CONTROL. How many organizations do the IT types really hold the purchasing power? Damn few.
We have:
1) Demands of a certain app must run on a certain hardware
2) Prejuidices of management
3) Biases towards COTS hardware for repair and upgrade concerns.
There are lots of reasons Macs don't penetrate much into many companies. Same reason as you go into your average small widget-making business you will likely not see a Sun or HP server there. Because the customer wants small and cheap and "common" and the IT staff may be Bubba's nephew.
Actually, I don't recommend Macs because my accounting, finance, auditing, and loan departments would have me fired if they suddenly found themselves without the applications they depend on. No, I'm not going to tell you what those applications those are. My marketing department would probably like it, but we're still stuck on Novell for file-sharing and there isn't a Mac client for that. In short, it's not because I don't want to learn it, it's because it won't do what I need it to do.
P.S. - If you think I'd put Macs on every desk in my call center you're just totally out of it.
What do you expect from Cringely? He has basically missed almost every boat that's docked in his port. He was Apple employee #26 and he turned down the option to get stock options in the company. He wrote a column for years and then lost his identity to the company he worked for. The last two articles I read of his were equally ridiculous: one suggesting people put a wi-fi PC in their attic to hide mp3s from investigators, and another suggesting a goofball anti-spam technique where people pay to send/receive email.
Cringely, unfortunately, is the Latoya Jackson of the computer industry.
The corporate standard is 1.7GHz machine with 256M of ram and a 17" CRT (not even flat screen).
Price out that computer and let me know which Apple I can get for that.
Well, pricing out a Dell system with roughly the same specs as a $1799 iMac was a $2673 PC. I don't think that supports your argument. Perhaps if you gave some exact requirements I could find you a PC that doesn't cost about $1000 more than a Mac.
Of course, I'd also like to point out just how screwed up a corporate environment is when they spec machines on vague hardware stats instead of on how useful they are in getting work done. That is, things like RAM requirements should be based on what software the user runs, not some useless hardware baseline.
That's a low-end server. Perfect for a small department server or maybe for hosting a small website.
s e/story/0,10801,83783,00.html
Also perfect for high-end applications by the United States Navy, ala nuclear attack submarines.
http://www.computerworld.com/industrytopics/defen
Those who laugh at you for you having a Mac.. are the people who constantly call you to fix their PC.
>You can add memory, but at a higher price when compared to PC.
BS. Same memory--go to crucial or anyplace you want.
"Science is a tribute to what we can know although we are fallible" -Jacob Bronowski
Open Directory on OS X server is very flexible, and you can choose to store your user lists in Password Server, Kerberos, or Active Directory. Then you don't have to worry about people getting your encrypted passwords.
Don't confuse OS X client capabilities with what's available in OS X Server.
What, me worry?
Hard to believe the parent was modded as "insightful".
Sad, people never learned to search the internet before pressing the flame button. There are a lot of studies that support Cringley's statement etc., and you'd be hard pressed to find a single study in the reverse!
BTW, I've seen studies supporting Linux as having a good TCO vs. Windows NT. I've never seen a study comparing Linux vs Mac TCO on desktop, and there are only a few studies comparing Linux vs Mac TCO in servers (the Mac usually comes out on top, but the studies are recent and may have bias).
Why is this modded as informative? It's misleading at the very least.
First off, the XServe is already running at 1.33 GHz (single or dual processor), so what's the frelling point of putting a 1.2 GHz processor in there? The upgrade you cite is designed specifically to fit in one of the older-model G4 machines (running significantly slower than 1 GHz).
The price difference is not just the chip. The G4 upgrade is a daughter card with a processor and cache memory (including L3 cache on most G4 daughter cards, these days). If the card contains L3 cache, that's about a megabyte or more of expensive high-speed SRAM.
The Athlon XP 2100 is a stand-alone chip, which I might add still requires a heat sink. No L3 cache, though, and no daughter card, so of course it's going to be cheaper.
Hi. I can't stand Cringely, and didn't read his article, but you might be interested to know that the Panther betas/seeds from around August 3 have supported a case sensitive HFS+. I've been waiting for this for a long time ( switched my desktops from Linux ), and it was heartbreaking to watch a bunch of knuckleheads complaining in a mac forum that this would 'destroy mac as we know it' ( movie at 11 ). Seriously, where do these people come from?
YLFI
One god, one market, one truth, one consumer.
That's where you are completely wrong! They are major upgrades! The jump to Jaguar (10.2.x) and the next jump to Panther (10.3.x) are paid upgrades because they include a whole bunch of new features. Jaguar included literally hundreds of updates. It would be like going from WinME to WinXP in comparision.
There's still confusion for the MS crowd about how the versioning works. 10.x.x is the brand name of the OS. It's OS Ten. The .x release is the operating system version. 10.0 was practically a beta. 10.1 was the first major release. 10.2 was Jaguar and soon there will be 10.3 which is Panther. In between you have the .x.x releases. These are completely free and for the most part don't add features per se. The .x.x releases are like Service Packs.
When was the last time you ended up with major features being added to Windows due to a Service Pack upgrade? I would venture little to none. You would get improvements like bigger disk support and bug fixes but not major changes or new features. Then why is Apple dropping the ball w/OSX on the G3?
Because it was a CLASS ACTION Lawsuit and they decided to settle it. Originally Apple stated that OS Ten would run on G3's then they back peddled a little bit and the OS exceeded the hardware abilities of these older machines. I believe it was a combination of a few factors.
- Major advances in Video card technologies at the time. i.e. new cards every couple of months. Hey day of 3D accelerators.
- Processor speeds were advancing very fast at the time as well.
- Memory prices were dropping like a rock.
- Apple engineers showed Jobs what Eye Candy was possible with newer hardware.
I have no doubt that if you strip out of the eye candy and turn off some of the other features those older G3's would actually run OS X rather well. The early 10.0.x beta was quite capable of running older systems. The same thing happened in the PC world as well. Suddenly 133Mhz / 233Mhz / 266Mhz machines were left in the dust by 500Mhz / 650MhzPish Posh. 1) Here's that old 'price difference' argument that held water maybe a dozen years ago, but oesn't cut it now. Current cost for OS X, assuming you are purchasing it retail, and not with the purchase of the computer: $130. Retail cost of Windows XP, likewise not included in the cost of the computer: $300. So even paying full OS costs for updated versions of X, it's 2 1/2 years before you equal the cost of a Windows machine. Many places are on a three year refresh anyhow. 2) Usability. Why are you talking about usability in terms of Windows Interoperability? It's a Macintosh, not a Windows slave. Look at usability, not interoperability. Support costs for Macs are far lower because the computers are inherently more usable by the average person. And you want interoperability? Office for Mac. Samba support. Burn DVDs that actually work in DVD players. USB, Ethernet, Firewire, 802.11b, ZeroConf, X11 free and out of the box (not on windows), and support for every major network protocol out there. 3) What you saw today was a class action suit because apple promised full support on all G3 machines, and then was unable to provide some parts of that (notably software DVD support and some graphics updates) for computers released in *1997*. Not recent machines by any stretch of the imagination. I'd like to see you get good XP graphics on a 2 meg video card (And a Pentium 2, introduced in May of that year) from over 6 years ago. I happen to be able to run OS X 10.2 just fine on my 1993 Beige G3, because it doesn't have a DVD drive and I don't use it for graphics. Guess what I use it for? A server in my mixed Mac/Windows/Linux environment. Not a chance that the G3 and G4 are going away in the next 2 years, as far as supported products go. You present logical arguments, but I don't see the reality backing it up.
"Is this not a rare fellow, my lord? He's as good at any thing, and yet a fool." -from "As You Like It", Act 5,
The integrated heat-spreader over the actual CPU die allows the heatsink to be much more efficient, for one thing...
Okay, first:
The password hashes are HASHES. Not encrypted. There's no way to get the original back, no matter how much CPU you have. Agreed that it's still not a great idea to let anyone at them, and I have to admit I was stunned that you could do it. I'll have to see if they use a different salt on each machine though, it adds a small measure of protection (if the passwords aren't simple). Download a copy of john and see how long it takes. My imac (running Linux) has been working on guessing a password to match my pw hash for more than ten days. The users on my system who used insecure p/ws were cracked in minutes.
Now you wanna talk security holes: by default, any DHCP server can send a URL of an LDAP server to OSX, and it'll authenticate users from that LDAP server. Yuck.
Second, you state that "OSX is much harder to work with," but don't explain how. Personally, I've found it much easier to learn than Linux was: I've never felt the need to compile my own OSX kernel, but I've had to do that repeatedly to Linux over the years. The distributed directory stuff in Jaguar rocks, and it integrates with LDAP, AD, whatever (and all of the above, simultaneously). See the macdevcenter at O'Reilly.
Agreed about Cringely: he's an idiot, IMHO. Can you name ANY profession that would recommend a change in their workplace that would remove themselves from being qualified to work there? Sheesh!
Consider: the nidump utility dumps out *encrypted passwords* to ANY user on the box, even 'nobody'. In other words, OSX doesn't even have the equivalent of shadow passwords!
In fact, the statement above is misleading. nidump dumps password that are stored in NetInfo, which is more-or-less the equivalent of NIS. When passwords are stored locally---that is, not through NetInfo---they are stored using shadow passwords. Now, if you compare with a Linux/Solaris/* environment using NIS, you can also obtain encrypted NIS passwords through ypcat. To avoid this situation, you would use Kerberos, which OS X also supports. Hence, your main complaint sounds rather biased to me.
This said, I agree with your complaint about filenames capitalization. However, the biggest complaint I would have about OS X Server is that, while its management tools are great as long as you stay on well charted roads, you need to circumvent them to get to tune more advanced settings. Then, it is not much different from setting/tuning a Linux box, except that file locations are slightly different.
Words fail me.
Hopefuly, you can recover now.
Hmm, i simply installed "daemonic" from fink (as well as "postfix-release"), typed "sudo daemonic enable postfix", & it installed a "daemonic-postfix" item in /Library/StartupItems which starts Postfix automatically with every reboot. (Previous to daemonic's emergence, I'd rolled my own startup item, which was pretty easy as well-- I just copied the SSH one from /System/Library/StartupItems & changed a few things.) Try it out.
Oddly enough, I just had a friend visiting tonight, who asked to use my computer to read her email and browse the web. So I let her use my desktop computer, a 233 MHz G3 running OSX 10.2.She was exclaiming, "Your computer is so fast!"
Now, I don't find it fast; I use it mostly as a music/photo server and spare computer, because it is noticeably pokey compared to my 800 MHz G4 powerbook. My point is that those of us whose income or business allows us to use reasonably current machines get very spoiled, and we forget that performance that we now find "unacceptable" only a few years ago seemed impressive.
And in fact, that old G3 is indeed perfectly adequate for web browsing, word processing, and running iTunes. And in my opinion, a big improvement over the same machine running OS9.
Ok, I have tried to read as may of the moderately rated posts as possible. What I have found was (sorry about the length):
-Many of the negative comments are based on issues / biases that have been resolved for several years. (Pre Mac OS 10.2 at least, most pre Mac OS 10.1)
-There was a post that complained about the difficulty of using Mac OS 10.2 Server. I personally find it extremely easy to use and manage. Mac OS 10.3 Server is making advances on that including adding the ability to act as a primary domain controller thanks to the inclusion of Samba 3. For the poster that did not like the management apps they have been completely rewritten as well as being able to be managed via the command line. On the documentation side yes it is a little light. That too is supposed to change in 10.3 Server. For more information on 10.3 Server go to for information on the currently shipping 10.2 server Oh and one more thing. Mac OS 10.2 Server received Product of the year from NetworkMagazine.com () that has to be worth something right?
-Cost. While Linux and BSD systems cannot be beat for cost. The amount of dedicated support and liability that they have can be. Microsoft on the other hand can be beaten in the per user license realm. Both in desktop OS and server OS Apple's Macintosh licensing fees are reasonable and flexible. The general single user licenses are free with purchase of a machine and $129 standalone. Apple can be flexible on this with large or educational purchases. The server version of their OS is even better priced $499 for a 10-user license and $999 for and unlimited user license. They also provide a plethora (sorry you never get to use that word enough) of support options all reasonably priced.
-Reliability and Stability. The one thing I absolutely love about Mac OS X is the stability it offers. This is part due to the OS and part hardware. The key thing here is that Apple controls them both. I don't have to worry about the hardware I'm running being compatible with the OS and vice versa. Apple has already done that for me. The result uptime. Which at the end of the day is worth the extra dollar for me. For instance the PowerBook, which I am writing this on, has had uptimes on the order of 80 days (I just put it to sleep when traveling.) The only time I have to reboot is when an update requires it.
-Major OS releases. When Apple releases a new version of its OS for example the to-be-released before the end of the year Mac OS 10.3 and Mac OS 10.3 Server add several new features and improvements not just "bug fixes." And the nice thing about the releases is that Apple takes feedback about its products and if the demand is high enough put it into its next release () for the client version and () for server. I want to see that from a major commercial OS.
-Open Source. Mac OS X is built on open standards, and open source. You can download and tweak Darwin, upload changes. The same features that you get with all open source projects. The exception to this is the GUI interface. Most other commercial operating systems do not give you this ability. Also check out Fink a package manager (based on the Debian package manager) for ported open source projects.
-Security. Mac OS X abandoned telnet in favor of the more secure SSH in 10.1. Apple has a quick response time to up coming security threats and releases an update to fix them (). Apple provides easy and efficient methods of applying the updates via "Software Update". The OS ships in a secure fashion with all incoming ports closed. There is a good paper on securing Mac OS X available at () There are A/V solutions from all of the main companies (Symantec, Sophos, Virex.) Tripwire has been ported for host based IDS. You can run snort, nmap, nessus, etc.
-Expandability and performance. The Power Mac G5 can handle up to 8GB of Ram. Show me a desktop PC that can handle that much memory. The G5 processor has a half speed front side bus so the Dual 2Ghz has two 1Ghz FS
>The upgrade price from ME to XP Home was $99 MSRP, ...and the cost of the full version? A 5-license package?
..and on...
>available for $75-$85 at most places.
Bear in mind as well that *every* copy of MacOS X is closer to the professional versions of windows than anything else.
>By contrast, OSX has delivered nothing quite as dramatic
>between 10.0 and 10.3.
Bullshit.
*Journaled FS
*Encrypted Home Directories
*Expose
*Quartz Extreme
*Recompiled in gcc3.1 (from 2.9--this is *very* major).
*Rendezvous
*Faster User Switching
*WebCore
*X11 Included
*Updated Web-browser (From IE 5 to Safari 1.0)
*The Darwin core (and kernel) have both been udpated.
*Inkwell
*Built-in faxing in every application
*A new finder interface and interface tweaks (with both 10.2 and 10.3--a new find function, spring-loaded folders, a whole new brushed metal interface for Panther...)
*/Enormous/ Speed Improvements
*iDisk Syncing
*Pixlet support
*Updated bundled applications (Mail, iTunes, iMove, and iPhoto, and iChat AV all come to mind)
*Serious improvements to the developers suite (Xcode, Shark, gcc3.3)
*Font Book
Integrate Keynote and LaTeX
I think a lot of what you say is on target. However, I think you overstate the overhead required to run a GUI. On my TiBook running OS-X (not Server) I don't see the GUI using more than a couple percent of the cpu. Only when I'm mousing around, 0% the rest of the time. The commands you run using a command line interface are going to take a *lot* more than that, so I doubt the GUI overhead is significant. I work at a company that produces (Linux based) IP switches. I'm always amazed that the industry likes the command line interfaces that are common. I personally would prefer a *well designed* GUI for configuring systems, but that doesn't seem to be what the industry wants. (or maybe it's just that people gave up after seeing a few thrown-together GUIs that missed the mark by a thousand miles?). The best thing, of course, is a really good GUI, that always allows you to drop into a command line for something the GUI didn't anticipate. BTW, I've been a Unix kernel programmer for 20 years, and I love Linux and I love OS-X. I do wish there was the equivalent of Aqua/Quartz for Linux. I've always thought that X11 only had one good idea: "Graphics should work across the network". I've never been impressed with the rest of the X11 man-machine interface. IMO X11 is one of the reasons GUIs haven't caught on with Unix servers. OS-X raises the bar in that respect, I think. I applaud Apple for trying to make OS-X Server easier to use with a (hopefully well thought out) GUI.
Support usually costs a fixed amount per purchase or per year, and not per support call, so recommending a solution because it requires _more_ support would be shooting yourself in the foot
- The design of the case, airflow, if done will increases the life of the drives. Apple puts more time and money into the design of it's products.