Apple's Fruitful Future

Apple's 30th Anniversary is prompting retrospective looks at the company's last three decades. C|Net grounds their look back in the here and now, commenting on lawsuits and competition. ZDNet complains that Apple still isn't in the workplace. The BBC looks at the company's world-changing aspects in a more upbeat story. Nick Irelan wrote in to mention a Forbes piece entitled Apple's Biggest Duds, so you can image what what side that article comes down on. CNN puts the whole thing in perspective, with a balanced look at the company's good and bad points. Finally, if you want some rumourmongering, 192939495969798999 writes "Industry sources have leaked that tomorrow, on the 30th Anniversary of Apple Computer, Steve Jobs will announce that the new intel-based Mac laptops will support dual-booting Windows XP and OS X 10.4."

Comments

Re:How to get Apple in the workplace

[gozar]

That experience doesn't exist (to the best of my knowledge) with the MacOSX environment. Drives can be mounted at power up but I don't see the same experience that people are accustomed to in Windows.

I have an integrated environment where there is Mac and Windows on the same network sharing access to files. They both access the Novell and Linux server files. Windows does it better. Mac will lose its network mountings without cause that is obvious to the user and without a mounting script, the user would generally need to restart the computer (and the apps) to resume normal work. In windows, if users are dicconected from a server, the user is notified.

If you put the shared drives into the Login Items for the user, they'll automatically mount when the user logs in. On my network I've never had OS X just lose connections for no apparent reason. If I'm on a laptop and put it to sleep, I'm notified when I open it back up if it can't reconnect to any servers.

For a managed environment, you'd want to put in an OS X server. The OS X server can bind to Active Directory (and I'm assuming eDirectory) so your OS X clients will mount the users Home Directory automatically. You also get all the managing capabilities for your OS X clients. Networked home directories are really nice, and if you set it up right, you can have your users log into a Windows client, Linux client, or OS X client and have the same Desktop and Documents folder automatically.

OS X also doesn't have problems that you see with Windows and its roaming profiles.