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."

Comments

Re:Hmmm, is it that complicated

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Hmmm, is it that complicated

[Mononoke]

Linux can be used as a file server/firewall/application server/web server/email server/DNS server/database server/all of the above at once without costing you nearly as much as an X-Serve.

You can do all of that with an iMac, if you wish.

And for years to come, you can always just add more RAM or upgrade the CPU(s) in the Linux box. "Upgrade time" for the Mac means buying a whole new X-Serve.

See, there's what the article is talking about: FUD. You can add RAM to an X-Serve. Somewhere down the road you can probably upgrade the CPU, also. There are CPU upgrades available for every single other Mac ever made, so it's quite likely that when the time comes that the original X-Serve CPU can't keep up, an upgrade will be available.

Re:I wouldn't suggest it

[laird]

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 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), ... 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).

Re:Hmmm, is it that complicated

[Anonymous Coward]

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, Linux really are better

[FunWithHeadlines]

At my company we use a variety of boxes throughout, Windows, Linux, Mac. We do this for a variety of reasons, among with is which systems the people using them like, what our customer needs are for development purposes, and so on. So from a real-world experience here are some points:

• 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.

Re:Hmmm, is it that complicated

[nettdata]

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.

Cringley argues......

[Awptimus Prime]

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. ;)

Re:Hmmm, is it that complicated

[Mononoke]

If apple made enterprise-quality hardware, we could compare those prices, too.

They do.

Re:Hmmm, is it that complicated

[47Ronin]

That's a low-end server. Perfect for a small department server or maybe for hosting a small website.

Also perfect for high-end applications by the United States Navy, ala nuclear attack submarines.

http://www.computerworld.com/industrytopics/defens e/story/0,10801,83783,00.html

Re:Hmmm, is it that complicated

[gozar]

On top of that, I don't particularly trust it. From a security perspective, I'm not at all sure about the quality of the design. 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! That is just so overwhelmingly boneheaded that I wouldn't trust it with my critical data.

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.

Re:From the article....

[tychay]

Hard to believe the parent was modded as "insightful".

Cool! Where are the numbers to support [Mac Total Cost of Ownership lower than Windows]? Probably isn't going to cut it. [More uncontrolled ranting...]

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).

Re:Pricing and Usability

[Whatchamacallit]

OS 10.1 & 10.2 would be considered service packs in the Microsoft world, and Apple is charging for 'em like they're a major upgrade to the OS.

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.

1. Major advances in Video card technologies at the time. i.e. new cards every couple of months. Hey day of 3D accelerators.
2. Processor speeds were advancing very fast at the time as well.
3. Memory prices were dropping like a rock.
4. 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 / 650Mhz /800Mhz and then the Pentium 4's! What happened to the older PC's? They are running Linux in places or being dumped on the trash pile or getting donated to schools, etc. I doubt that we could gang up on MS and sue them with a Class Action stating we want a refund because XP won't load on my Pentium II!

Re:Hmmm, is it that complicated

[koehn]

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!

Re:Hmmm, is it that complicated

[defago]

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.

Re:Hmmm, is it that complicated

[klez23]

And some things (like postfix) absolutely WILL NOT start from SystemStarter. (I spent a LONG time on this one; I still have to log into my Mac after a reboot and issue 'postfix start' as root. It WILL NOT run from SystemStarter.)

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.

Re:Hmmm, is it that complicated

[tgibbs]

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.

Apple as a viable option...

[asecurityjunkie]

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

Re:Pricing and Usability

[Llywelyn]

>The upgrade price from ME to XP Home was $99 MSRP,
>available for $75-$85 at most places. ...and the cost of the full version? A 5-license package?

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 ..and on...