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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."
Now if only Apple would get their shit together when it comes to their server products. Anyone who has had to administer OS X 10.5 Leopard Server knows that the entire release was a complete gong show. From crashing AFP and directory services, to a half-implemented calendaring solution, a laughably broken server administration GUI (I mean, who would want to mark reverse zones as transferable _anyway_), and countless other problems... Microsoft , Red Hat, SuSE and Ubuntu are just walking all over them when it comes to the server offering.
Sure the Apple stuff is integrated and works for the basic case. However, if you try to move past what is written in the sparse user manual, you not only lose support for your basic "AppleCare" but also have to spend time figuring out how Apple has mangled the pieces of the open source offerings that hold their stuff together.
That all being said, I think with some work and polish the server side of things could really become a viable solution. It's just not quite there yet. This is coming from someone who administers these things for a living...
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.
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.
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)
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
You went to the Apple store and had it fixed? This is why Slashdot is no fun any more.
Where's the story about using a Dremel, an old VCR, a soldering iron, and a Perl script to fix it yourself?
as touched on in the article, Apple is overly secretive on new upcoming things. This is not what companies want. I work in an IT department and I've seen what both IBM and sun have coming in the next few years. Its called a non-disclosure. This helps my bosses shape future purchasing requirements, because they know whats coming ahead of time, versus a big flashy presentation at a conference and it being available in afew days.
Apple has to realize if they want to compete, they need to open up a bit to their larger buyers. Yes, the consumer market is great, but now that users are becoming apple savvy, you want them to have the opportunity to bring it to their workplace. Its a similar thing happening with Linux. My bosses were very anti Linux, but the latest batch of graduates have so much experience with it, its being rolled into our environment. You get people using it at home/school and they will want it at work.
I work at a MAJOR cable television network, based in Atlanta, with branch offices all over the country and about to be global. Our in-house Mac inventory has only been steadily increasing over the last few years and is expected to go even higher in the next budget. Whole departments are switching to MacBook Pros, en masse, and not just the "creatives". Even the engineering department is switching over to Mac, as most of their applications have OS X versions or they BootCamp/VMWare Windows if need be. Even Blackberries are being supplanted by iPhones, since the recent patch allowing Exchange integration and the next version of the device being fully Exchange compatible (according to our Apple vendor).
From a support standpoint, the transition is a little rougher, as others here have noted, but the company is paying to have their support staff become Apple certified techs (myself included) in order to do the work in-house and keep our warranties intact.
The server side is also increasing, for the specific purpose of running the data ingest software used to manage clips for our HD transition.
Some of us have even messed around with the hacked OS X kernals floating around and I can report that it runs BEAUTIFULLY on a Dell GX520. If companies like Psystar are indeed a harbinger of things to come, I see Apple's market share in the corporate environment only continuing to rise.
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.
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?
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.
I don't care why you're posting AC