The Mac In the Gray Flannel Suit

oDDmON oUT points us to a BusinessWeek story about the increasing use of Apple products in the corporate sector. Many companies are finding that their employees are pushing for the transition more than Apple itself. Quoting: "While thousands of other companies scratch and claw for the tiniest sliver of the corporate computing market, Apple treats this vast market with utter indifference. After a series of failed offensives by the company in the 1980s and 1990s, Chief Executive Steve Jobs decided to focus squarely on consumers and education customers when he returned to Apple in 1997. As a result, the company doesn't have ranks of corporate salespeople or armies of repairmen waiting to respond every time a hard drive fails. He believes it's difficult for any company, including his, to be effective at satisfying both corporate buyers and consumers."

Comments

Re:Repairing em'

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't imagine what it would be like


I'm sorry you have no imagination. Here's some help:

My wife's shiny white plastic iMac (3 years old) died on Thanksgiving. I took it to the nearest Apple store the next day, the busiest shopping day of the year. They replaced the power supply for free. I was in the store for half an hour.

I now have a mac, too.

Why not just use BSD then?

[pandrijeczko]

OS X is a desktop OS, that's why it comes with all the (unnecessary) eye candy.

If you need a server OS, you don't need eye candy on it. OS X is built on a BSD core, therefore just use BSD for your server.

Re:Why not just use BSD then?

[caseih]

Sounds like someone who's a) never used OS X server and b) never had to wrangle OpenLDAP, Kerberos, Samba, and SASL on a regular Linux server.

It's fine to say, stick with BSD or Linux, but they only ship with pieces of the puzzle, not integrated at all. This is especially apparent in the Directory Services area. Sad to say but nothing except Apple's offering comes close to competing with ActiveDirectory. OpenLDAP itself is great (and we use it to serve up information on thousands of users), but it's just one piece. Then you have Kerberos, Samba (with its own password schemes), SASL Authd, Radius, etc. With BSD and OpenLDAP, Kerberos, and Samba, you can get it working pretty well but you still have to deal with changing passwords in two or more places, different password expiry schemes that all have to be kludged together sometimes with spit and baling wire.

Apple's solution, on paper, is more ideal. Directory Services exports both an authentication layer and an authorization layer, welded together in a common API and common admining tools. Change the user's password and the password server, which integrates SASL, Kerberos, NTPassword, and LMPassword hashes, everything, no matter what protocol, keeps everything in sync. There are no passwords stored in LDAP at all, which is as it should be. Samba, PAM, SASL clients, etc, all talk to the password server. Contrast this with most LDAP installations on nix. There's a userPassword field, which can have any number of hash types in it. Then there's the shadowAccount attributes for password expiry. Then there's sambaNtPassword, and SambaLMPassword fields with their own hashes. Then there's Kerberos off to the side, never really integrated (except for certain kinds of SASL binds). It's honestly a mess. I hope that in the future, other products like Fedora Directory will take care of many of these problems. Samba 4 certainly will be a huge leap forward. One which I hope (with it's integrated LDAP system) will finally compete with ActiveDirectory.

In short, what Apple has done with OS X Server is a tantalizing idea of what we could do in the *nix server space if we put our minds to it. Sadly Apple's solution is lacking in many areas including just being half-baked and their enterprise support is non-existent. They have also never published their APIs to develop pam-DirectoryService and nss-DirectoryService for conventional Unix OS's, either, which is very short-sighted. So Apple's solution has promise, but tends to fall down outside of the base cases. But the standard alternatives are also very bad.

Re:Great for Entrepeneurs

[v1]

OSX also offers no default lock-screen option like windows does

Open Applications/Utilities/Keychain Access. Select Preferences, Show Status in Menu Bar.
Now anytime you want to lock the screen, just click on the padlock up by the clock and select Lock Screen.
This will require a password to exit the screen saver, even if you have your screen saver not set to require password.

I use Quicksilver's FastLogout option

FYI, fast user logout sans QuickSilver is Shift-Opt-Cmd-Q. (you have to hold the keys about 1/3 second)

Re:Dear Apple

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

HP and Dell send technicians onsite to service problems like this, no questions asked. It's like pulling teeth to get repairs out of your people. Until you figure out how to fit into business customer's needs, you will self-limit your reach.

I've worked at several companies that use Dell, HP, and Apple machines. We don't get any onsite service from any of them. When a machine breaks, we give the user a spare and ship the broken one back to the company. If the machine is functional enough, we migrated the data and config to the spare (where practical). I'm sure for big iron, this is different, but not for end user systems.

Of the 4 new Macs I've worked on in the past year, 1 Macbook, 3 silver towers, 3 of the machines had hardware problems out of the box or within 1 week of unpacking. Specifically the broken speakers and dead Firewire ports. FIX YOUR QA PROBLEMS, CUPERTINO.

Your anecdotes are great and all, but according to objective, independent testing Apple hardware has lower failure rates for both laptops and desktops than, well any other major OEM. The only one close is Sony. We all have hardware problems occasionally, but I'm going to have to go with an objective, formal study from Consumer Reports and backed up by several other companies, when deciding which vendor has a QA problem.

In the meantime I will be recommending HP, Lenovo or other for laptops and desktops.

Congrats on recommending hardware with lower reliability based upon your lack of research. P.S. Strangely Dell laptops are actually near the top of the heap for reliability, a big change from about a year ago. Hopefully anyone really making purchasing decisions for a living will actually do their homework.