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

APPLE HAS NO MID-RANGE HEAD LESS DESKTOPS!

[Joe The Dragon]

And a lot of corporate users are on mid towers they also like to reuse displays from older systems and like to swap out hard disks / not have to send them off to have them replaced.
The imac / mini are not that easy to be opened up and you can void the warranty by doing so. They also don't have send off a hard disk with data on it. HP and others let's you keep the bad hard disk and get a new one.

also the mini is not a good buy next to other systems at the same price and the mac pro is over kill for most users. AIO do not fit in to corporate use of systems and other AIO out there make it a lot easier to swap out HDD's as well.

A good $700-$2100 mid tower will be a nice fit in a corporate setting.

There laptops can use some work as well like an 15" screen at $1200-$1900 not $2000 and up.

Shouldn't be expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

If one desktop computer being down a whole day is very expensive, you might want to reconsider your business organisation.

Every company I was in (and that ranges from the very small to humongous worldwide behemoths) had a couple spares at the department level.

And you surely wouldn't store your critical data on one desktop?

/and don't call me Shirley

Re:Repairing em'

[multisync]

Not sure how you could do better than a day. We get next day from Dell, and we pay a lot for that coverage. Spend five minutes answering the usual questions (capacitors budging? LEDs flashing? Did you try turning it off and on again?), and the next day I receive either a power supply, a mother board or one a new drive via UPS. Return old part in same box and never give it another thought.

Blackberrys, OTOH, just get wiped and returned to RIM. I would think you would do that with a Mac, too. I wouldn't even know how to open one up, and if I did manage to get it open I'd feel the same way I feel when I look under the hood of any modern vehicle. Where's the damn carburetor?

So I guess the question for me would be does Mac offer a next day replacement service, and what does it cost? We'll leave aside for now what to do about the proprietary, Windows only software that our customer base compels us to use.