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Why Apple Doesn't Market Squarely To Businesses
snydeq writes "Despite feature enhancements that suggest otherwise, Apple remains lukewarm to any Mac and iPhone success in business environments. 'Apple has intentionally created a glass ceiling it has no intention of shattering. My conversations with Apple employees over the past decade have always been off the record when it comes to the topic of Macs in the enterprise. The company has had no intention of signaling any active plans to serve the enterprise,' InfoWorld's Galen Gruman writes. 'In a sense, Apple views enterprise sales as "collateral success" — a nice-to-have byproduct of its real focus: individuals, developers, and very small businesses ... likely because to do otherwise would greatly increase the complexity Apple would have to deal with.'"
Seriously, if you have a couple of people in an office and no full time admin Macs save you a small fortune.
So, fit for business? Yes.
Ready for the enterprise?
Dennis Onstenk
Apple's not very big on jumping into crowded markets. I'd love to see them take a good shot at unseating Windows in the server business, but they look at how much it would cost to try to push their way in, versus what they can make if they put the same resources into something like the iPad. So far, Apple's growing like crazy without doing much about the business market.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Gotta have a stomach to run such an outfit.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
Businesses certainly run Macs but they really don't have any great centralized administration tools. Apple Remote Desktop and Open Directory aren't nearly as powerful out of the box as Active Directory and its accompanying tools. There's nothing comparable to Exchange server that I know of. MacOS is to business desktop computing in much the same way linux is...you can use it, but you need to develop the tools for administering it (or use some open source tools, etc).
Of course not, that would mean they would have to be more active about following industry standards like PXE boot and remote management. The enterprise tools that are available for apple are very limited compared to what they can do with Windows (Altiris etc). If apple wants to get into the enterprise market and out of their present niches they need to start working with enterprise management companies on enterprise management.
Businesses demand a lot of esoteric features and are concerned with getting the cheapest hardware possible. They have no desire or tolerance for "cool" Completely not the market Apple is going for.
Apple has traditionally had two target markets. Those markets are education and "creative professionals". Creative professionals aren't going to turn out enterprise applications, but they can sure come up with some spiffy product literature. The education culture is focused on learning, not application development. In the past decade Apple has expanded their focus to include the consumer market.
Apple is so far behind the curve in the business market that they'd run themselves out of money trying to play catchup. They can't compete in the desktop space. I've heard that their X-Serve boxes are nice, but even in the SMB market they'd get clobbered by HP and Dell. They don't have anything close to what IBM and Oracle/Sun are putting out for enterprise customers. Beyond that, there aren't enough developers targeting the platform to develop the accounting packages, ERP systems, groupware servers, etc. that businesses run on.
What does it offer that any other *nix would not? GUI (On server side it do not make that much sense). Linux license cost is free and there are lots of resources (people mainly) are available and the same cannot be said Apple OS.
Quite a lot of laptops are making inroads into the business environment which used to be just Windows Shop. But if you still see, they are runnig Windows OS on it for majority of the cases. I think Apple would face the same compitition like MS from Linux and other Open source OS.
Advertising/marketing/ frequently used heterogeneous OS X / Windows environments. I've been with a couple of organizations like that, and it works surprisingly well from an admin viewpoint.
That didn't work, let me try it again: Advertising/marketing/(insert creative field here) businesses frequently use heterogeneous OSX+Windows environments. I've been with a couple of organizations like that, and it works surprisingly well from an admin viewpoint.
people who value apple's simplicity + power and have the $$ to indulge are extremely likely to be thought leaders in their organizations...instant word-of-mouth
Doing B2B sales is completely different (longer attention spans, bigger deals, but much more demand for customization/configuration).
Needless to say, Apple's image and culture is focused completely away from B2B type sales. Furthermore, they are focusing on what they're successful at. I wish other companies would take Apple's lead, and do something *really* well and only venture into other markets when they have aligned their brand with that market audience.
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I don't mean downsize in the sense of "fire".
What I mean is, that right now if you want to do enterprise iPhone development, you have to have an employee base of 500 people. Seems fair enough at first...
But the trouble is, although you can have a normal developer account and distribute applications via AdHoc to your employees - where the limit is 100 separate devices.
Now you probably are not going to need one device per employee. You can kind of work around that with multiple accounts, but that's a pain - it would thus be way better if they made the step clear, by supporting 500 devices on any developer account OR dropping down Enterprise requirements to 100 employees.
To me what separates "small business" from Enterprise is a clear delineation of worlds... a small business does not mind having data exist all over the place, whereas an "Enterprise" studiously guards data and wants to keep as much of it in-hous as possible (and then send it all to India as an afterthought).
That's why the enterprise iPhone program is useful, because it keeps your business apps off the store. Basically anything Apple can do to support self-isolation helps the enterprise, and they've actually been much better about this in recent years (along with adopting ActiveSync all over and adding in good VPN support, which again goes back to that "separate world" thing).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If you ignore the products that they market to businesses, then it probably does look like they don't market to businesses.
Apple sells fashionable gadgets and a small number of Unix based computer systems. Entering the "enterprise" market would increase the quantity and variety of software and hardware they would have to support. Add in a dozen server form factor systems that have to cater to a wide variety of potential business needs and say goodbye to your reputation of being a company that sells products that "just work". That reputation is only just barely deserved as it is, and they only sell a handful of unique products.
If Apple marketed to corporate america, they'd have to make docking stations... not the crappy third party ones that by pulling a handle, they plug in all your cables.
Oracle, SAP, and Microsoft would beg to disagree.
They would have to provide and support their products longer then a consumer product cycle. Things like releasing a $3000 workstation then 3 years later releasing an OS update that doesn't support it don't fly well in enterprise environments.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
Hell, the only major software released for OS X has either been (poorly) written by Apple, or has been writen by a company that Apple bought specifically so they wouldn't be able to release a Windows version of the software.
Huh??? What are you talking about?!
Liberal? Conservative? Compare perspectives at Left-Right
Apple does have at least some enterprise business, or they wouldn't bother continuing to sell and support products like the XServe.
Meanwhile, OSX's similarity to BSD makes it easy for Open Source Linux projects to be ported to Mac.
Doesn't market squarely to business, then why the hell do they sell Xserves with dual quad core xeons, 24GB ram, 3TB w/on board RAID, FC cards, XSAN (!) software, even reselling Promise vTrak raid storage, and Tandberg 80-tape storage libraries on the Apple store website. A SAN deployment among XServes and Mac Pros is not exactly a 'very small business' kind of situation. They took some big steps but it feels like Apple is dropping the ball on the business side beyond individual sales.
I went from the Windows world of all 'enterprisey' all the time to the Apple world of 'yeah it SHOULD work in your enterprisey solution unless you want reliable Active Directory/Open Directory integration without jumping through many hoops and crossing your fingers'
And don't get me started on the RAGE that occurred when I realized this spanking new MacBook Pro uses the magsafe connector and its patented with no third party options and NO DOCKING STATION. I'm used to having options, now I'm stuck with a very linear choice.
I'm just having one of those weeks. Apple needs to get it together and go full speed ahead on business oriented software systems, I'm running headlong into this in a business that is decidedly Mac but wants to expand greatly (and stay Mac). The OS X Server tools feel unpolished and/or unresponsive at times, and the command line support and documentation is wholly inadequate.
I guess I'm just turning into an old bastard IT Admin. Damn kids better stay off my lawn.
Cheers.
This is my sig. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
AFAIK, Microsoft makes the bulk of its money by selling to the big corporations. By entering the enterprise market, Apple would attack Microsoft biggest and safest money source. If they do that, Microsoft will stop selling MSOffice for Mac and will prevent Macs from interacting with the AD. This way, Apple will lose more trying to enter the enterprise market than ignoring it altogether.
Laudele lor desigur m-ar mahni peste masura.
And who is don?
To properly cater and market to faceless corporations, you have to become one. There are no shortcuts, it takes a machine to relate to a machine. Case in point, Microsoft started losing its juice when it got serious about enterprise. Those MS guys used to laugh at the "old" IBM; they howled derisively when the IBMers tried to become cooler by switching from blue suits to sport jackets. Now Microsoft have become them and the enterprise customers love 'em -- they're on the same wavelength. They made lots of money but lost their soul.
Just off the top of my head:
1) Price.
2) Legacy (OS/applications).
The first one is pretty obvious.
The second, I need to define better. Apple generally limits new hardware to the version of the OS that was in production when the machine was built. So I can't work out all of the kinks in 10.4.11 relevant to my environment and load up all new systems with an image of that same OS. The most recent PowerMacs I've bought won't run 10.4. I had 10.4 locked tight and all of our software runs great on it. 10.5 gives me font cache problems similar to the ones I'd already ironed out of our 10.4 systems long ago. To me, that's not an upgrade. I don't want bleeding-edge in production. I want stable and reliable.
OTOH, every PC I've bought since Vista came out has been able to run XP just fine. In fact, I just got some new systems last week pre-loaded with XP. (Win7 license with XP downgrade.) This means the environment my company's been grooming and tweaking for years can be applied to brand new installations and I don't have to deal with, "I've never seen THAT before."
And getting back to the cost, I can get a decent C2D windows machine with 4 gigs and a 20" flat panel, keyboard, and mouse for about $500. A mini with 4 gigs, no monitor, and no mouse starts at $700. Apple wants another $50 each for a mouse and keyboard. Each. Don't even ask what they want for monitors.
Those are the two main reasons Apple won't be making it beyond the Creative departments in my company. And I'm actually a bit annoyed that we're still purchasing Macs for those departments since they're running Adobe suites that are available on the PC. If one of my hats wasn't "the only mac tech in the company", I'd consider making strong arguments against the continued waste of money. :)
I've never heard of anyone who works at a company that uses Macs.
I work in a large research institution, and nearly every scientist or programmer I've met here uses a Mac on their desktop (though the HPC resources are mostly Linux/UNIX variants). One thing that would be great is if Apple would customize their computers for their corporate and government clients, since all of our Macs have to be modified to remove cameras, WiFi, etc.
Just because you've never heard of it, hardly means it doesn't happen.
Companies in creative industries (e.g. like R/GA) are typically a mix of Macs and PCs, but you probably knew that. But in 30+ years of supporting computers, I've seen plenty of mixed organizations. Usually they'll have 90% PCs with a handful of Macs for either (a) the creative types in the design department, or (b) the people who demanded one because it was "better" in some way. Heck, nearly 20 years ago I came across a lab full of heavily-used Mac IIci's and IIfx's at an IBM research facility, and that was in the old Motorola 680x0 heyday (e.g. before the IBM-Motorola PowerPC developments).
And your estimation of cost is not quite correct. Training and migration, yes. But overall total ownership cost is generally less over a Mac's lifetime than with a Windows computer, even if the original purchase price was significantly more. I have seen this over and over. A university I previously worked at had roughly 600 PCs and employed one full-time computer technician for every 50 PCs... and for their ~100 Macs, they employed one half-time Mac guy. Same level of support.
Liberal? Conservative? Compare perspectives at Left-Right
Apple builds OSs that largely get out of your way so you can get work done.
Enterprises like OSs that can be locked down until you can't get any work done.
Polar opposites in agendas really.
The previous comments are only true, if no-one says they're wrong.
Mod parent down for minor good point ghetto blasted by ignorance on the quality of Apple code.
Mod parent down for cliched bullshit mindless turtleneck comment.
Mod down parent because he is a tight wad who inserted his butt plug without enough lube today.
Here's the dirty little secret we all know:
Schools (and easy piracy) train people to use Windows and Windows-based software. If you're at home, who cares if you have to spend a few hours to learn the OS, or a new email system, or a paint program.
Go into a business office, and an employee costs $100/hr or more to train. With, say, 12 desktop apps the typical employee might use - half of which have no direct port - and maybe a dozen hours to get "fully productive" on the custom apps, you've got a $7000 price you have to add to every mac you put on a desk. (that's why corps also are loathe to upgrade within windows)
Of course, that's not the whole of it - there's the app side, too...
What about the custom s/w written for PC that the in-house foo group uses. Tack on another 5 (if you're lucky) to 7 figures to rewrite that app. How about apps that have no direct analog in the Mac world? You're fucked if you have to interact natively with businesses that use AutoCAD or Pro/Engineer. What? There are translators? Sure - but how much productivity will be lost (and now we're into higher paid workers - maybe $80-$150/hr in opportunity cost) if the translation isn't perfect - and it never is.
When you're at home, it may never matter - the embedded apps are "good enough". When you're in business, there's more in play.
I know some of you will cry that management is easier, so it's cheaper. Really? Is it actually cheaper to hire a competent Apple admin (do they even exist in significant quantity?). If you're a small to medium business, you've only got an IT staff of 1 anyway, so 1 Win admin isn't going to cost you more than 1 apple admin. Sure, you might outsource it, but if you have more than a dozen employees do you really want your whole office dependent on an outside firm with hundreds of other (larger) clients? You're still paying a retainer every month, and you know you'll take it up the ass (at $125-$200/hr) if anything does go wrong (and it will).
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
I work in the ITS of my university and whenever the faculty and staff using macs consider or even hear about management apps like puppit or how if they have a PC they MUST install (novell) zen they cringe. They HATE the idea of the IT department invading their computer because their PC(Linux, Mac or Windows ) still feels personal. Even the sub-departments of our IT infrastructure HATE it when our the central sysadmins push updates to computers without telling the departmental support teams.
http://infoworld.com/print/112907
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I maintained an OS X Server box for 4 years. Very nice hardware, but the OS had a lot of issues (10.3 and 10.4) and support from Apple was non-existent. We struggled with a race condition in Apple's directory services architecture (the glue between the system and LDAP) for years. Apple really wouldn't do anything about it until some guy on a forum managed to come up with step-by-step instructions on how to trigger the condition. finally Apple acknowledged the problem and, to my amazement, said, "we've fixed it in our new OS, please upgrade." We're talking a full OS upgrade from 10.3 to 10.4. I tried to explain to them that OS's are upgraded in an enterprise normally with the hardware cycle and that we cannot take a production server down for a full system upgrade. Even MS understands that.
Additionally, the lifespan of Apple's server OS was tied exactly to their consumer OS. So instead of 5-6 years that we expect from RH and MS, apple supports their server OSs for about 2 years only. Even within major versions, updating was a real pain. Each and every OS update required a reboot. It was just silly. Of course the bug brought our system down every month or so, so I guess that worked out.
Another time a disk died in our XServe RAID. So we called to get a warranty replacement. The guy on the phone said, "are you sure it has died? Put it back in the array and see what happens." Dumbfounded, I told him this was a production array with mission-critical data on it and that I simply could not trust any disk that had been kicked out of the RAID. The risk was too great for data loss. Had to go through a local rep to lean on apple to just replace the disk.
After I finally figured out how to make my OpenLDAP server on Linux look and act like Apple's OpenDirectory (making Mac client access seamless with no custom ldap mappings required), I ditched the OS X server and will never go back.
The bulk of enterprise space wants cheap whitebox farms of GateDellPaq machines interchangeable and uninspiring of possessiveness enough that the IT guy can drop by your desk and switch out your box four times a year and you won't care.
Apple, meanwhile, has a farm full of insanely loyal customers willing to pay premium prices to avoid precisely the GateDellPaq style of non-shiny nuts-and-boltism.
To get the part of enterprise space that they can't get with their current business offerings, they'd have to do things that would alienate a tremendously loyal, premium-paying customer base. And for what, exactly? To enter the tremendously crowded, cutthroat space of GateDellPaq where everyone competes on price and has to ensure compatibility with a massive ecosystem of devices and ISVs?
Why exactly would they do this?
Why does every other Slashdot poster seem to imagine that the goal of Linux, or Apple, or OLPC, must be to dominate the world and arrive in every home and business everywhere with all competition eliminated? I suspect many businesses would be more than happy to be in Apple's shoes right now, and I also suspect that their investors aren't too upset with them for not going out there trying to get every MBA farm on the block buying an Apple line of cheap-and-dirty-ware.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
I used to - and one of the biggest. We switched to PCs and nothing has worked quite right since, and really no serious attempt has been made to fix it for 12 years. Document control, in particular, has completely broken down. We still have a few Macs around (OS8.6 and OS X) to try to correct document corruption problems caused by PCs. Even on PC to another can't correctly read, render, or print a document correctly. Create it in Office 2000, move it to another Office 2000 machine, characters are screwed up. It's even worse with 2000/2003/2007 and NT/XP/Vista (for those poor saps who got stuck with it). Put them on the Mac, using Office 98/2001/VX/2004, and frequently, no problem, and/or you can fix it and have it work with any of the PC versions. But reports created on 2003 two days ago, into Windows-based document control, and try to extract them today, completely hosed.
For critical items, we print it out (however we can get a correct version, PC or Mac) then scen them in as TIFF files. This was suggested by the senior Microsoft tech working the Platinum trouble ticket as the most reliable way!
Brett
It was 4:20 on the coast when he posted that.
What about the stuff about hardware open-ness? Seriously 90% of the hardware problems are because the supplier used 3-rd rate components, or shipped with faulty drivers. Granted, yes there are instances when you need a special card to drive a device, but when was a last time a legion of bankers or bean counters demanded some crazy hardware? Yes, clearly it's a great investment into my business.
Software open-ness? Certainly, that's why you can, you know, grab a copy of XCode for free and start developing for OS X. But that's just too much work, when you're doped up on info world and other pundits, it's much easier to whine.
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
Always with the docking stations crap. When are you people going to learn to use that new fangled Google thing to find your bloody docking stations. Must I always do it for you?
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
I've never heard of anyone who works at a company that uses Macs. The company I work at uses PCs exclusively, and probably saves quite a bit of money by doing so. My work PC has never crashed, has never had a virus, runs relatively fast, and was probably quite cheap. I do have to have an IT person mess with computer every now and then, and thats usually because a poorly written application fails and needs to be reinstalled.
For most businesses switching to Macs would require new IT people, retraining of employees, and finding applications that function in OS X. The computers would also likely cost considerably more than PCs.
Ever heard of Cisco? We are free to run a Mac that the company will pay for, as long as IT doesn't have to support it. We have an internal user community that provides its own support in lieu of IT. There are thousands of Mac users here. I switched about four months ago thinking that the worst-case scenario is that I could still run Windows on the hardware if switching to a new OS didn't work out. So far, I'm still running OSX, but am also still running Outlook under virtualization; enterprise messaging on the Mac is currently not very good.
Obviously this type of solution is not for everyone, but it works for us.
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
To properly cater and market to faceless corporations, you have to become one.
And Apple are NOT a 'faceless corporation'!!!
Apple have a face and it is the face of GOD!!!
Yeah, right.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
Apple wants to lock down your software and hardware every which way.
Businesses can't operate in such an environment.
Ahh, so THAT'S why no major corporations use Flash on their websites or Microsoft Office documents internally.
Those with unusually long memories will remember that, in the '80s, the Macintosh (and while it lasted, the Lisa) were Apple's Serious Business Computers. The Apple II was the home/education line.
The Mac had networking built-in from the beginning. (Not very useful for home users, essential for offices.) It had a black-and-white screen. (Not very useful for games or creative work.) Advertising almost exclusively focused on how a Mac could make businesses more efficient by reducing training and support costs. Watch:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1MaDXt30xSo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4dqLT0UBPx0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwcuSOfjR6w
Print ads, too:
http://www.macmothership.com/gallery/newads10/Macad1.jpg and http://www.macmothership.com/gallery/newads10/Macad2.jpg
For about fifteen years, Apple desperately wanted to be taken seriously by business users, who dismissed Macs as incompatible and expensive (with good reason.) Apple lost loads of money during this period. Meanwhile, Apple's sales were coming entirely from home users, artists, and education sales.
One of the first things Steve Jobs did when he returned was shit-can that approach and release the cute, cuddly, home-student oriented iMac. And whaddya know, the company suddenly started making money.
And Microsoft doesn't?
If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.
Microsoft might even agree with your assessment, and may still labor under the delusion that Microsoft Office is their very own Sword of Damocles. However, I suspect that the sword may not be hanging by a thread above the seat in which Steve Jobs is sitting. Perhaps they haven't looked up, lately.
I've already said too much.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
Because their service level agreements are just not good enough.
I standard "business" laptop from Dell comes with next business day on-site service, wherever you are in the world (well, within reason.)
i don't care how attractive Apple's laptops are, unless they can give me that sort of coverage for USD$1500, I'm not interested. I continually hear horror stories from my friends with Apple laptops about what they need to go through for it to get fixed.
When you travel, and travel a lot, you discover that stuff does have a finite lifetime - especially hard drives. There's only so many bumps from being wheeled around or bouncing through air pockets that they will take.
Steve Jobs has done a pretty good job of giving Apple his face and his persona. I don't have any kind of Apple hardware, but have to marvel that they still has a passionate culture after all these years. Contrast that with your typical enterprise customer, say some typical insurance company.
How the hell did this get +1 insightful?
Sure, hate Apple all you like, but if you are going to get modpoints on /., at least use your brain. This is just laughably poor moderation. Hello Kitty Island Adventure might be more your level of technical content, whoever modded the parent post.
If the X Serve isn't aimed at Enterprise users, I don't know what is. I use both X Serves and Dell Linux servers, and rate them about equal overall.
they like to make you pay over a $1000 more for a desktop pc then one you can get with the same cpu power + X2 ram and better video card and the imacs are not a good fit as Businesses like to reuse the displays.
Also the hard to get to HDD's in the Imacs and some what with the mini are a trun off for data security. You do not want to ship out a system with data on it for warranty work. Also the build in web cam is a BIG no for some Business in the imac as well.
The mini will be a good system if they dropped the price to $500 with a good sized HDD and 2-4gb of ram as make easier to open.
Justin Long doesn't work in the enterprise! He's too hip to work for the man.
Case in point, Microsoft started losing its juice when it got serious about enterprise
Microsoft has always been serious about the enterprise market.
In July of 76 Microsoft was selling its microcomputer BASIC to corporate clients like General Electric.
In April of 79: Microsoft 8080 BASIC was the first microprocessor product to win the ICP Million Dollar Award, "traditionally dominated by software for mainframe computers."
The single most important decision Microsoft ever made was to negotiate a non-exclusive license for MS-DOS. That would permanently alter the landscape. Apple is the lone survivor of the era when hardware and software was tightly bundled.
In 1983 Microsoft Multiplan spreadsheet the company's first application product, was ported across many platforms. "While Lotus 1-2-3 surpassed Multiplan in domestic markets, Multiplan was the winner in almost every other country in which it appeared."
In September of 83 Microsoft introduced Word for MS-DOs 1.0. Microsoft Timeline
No, it's the face of Steve. He's heard of this God fellow, and he plans to have a long talk with him someday about the way he's been running things, but he hasn't hired him as Apple's public face.
What don't you just print then directly to TIFF or PDF. I'm sure there is a driver available that emulates a printer and just prints to a TIFF or PDF file instead of paper. The way you are doing it seems like a huge waste of paper! (and time)
I believe he's referring to Final Cut. But he seems to have forgotten some other software released by such companies as Microsoft, Adobe, and Oracle, not to mention countless other smaller ones.
If things are as bad as you say they are in the windows environment, I think it is time for you to find a new IT staff.
"The two most abundant elements in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity." -Harlan Ellison
Once multitouch interfaces begin to replace the archaic desktop metaphor, Apple will be in a much better position to move into the enterprise market since they will be the major company pushing the technology.
The product they sell is so good, businesses are adapting to Apple - using open standards rather than developing for IE, .NET, etc, making things work cross-platform, etc. Apple just needs to keep doing what they do well already and "the enterprise" will catch up. It's already happening.
Apple invests a lot of time and money in removing control elements to what an individual needs to make the device a fluid part of their lifestyle.
You're really deep inside that Reality Distortion Field. I think The Onion analysed the situation best with its prescient Macbook Wheel promo:
Apple Introduces Revolutionary Laptop WIth No Keyboard
Simplicity is good, yes, but so are buttons and control surfaces for complex multi-modal devices that can change state instantly and enable the user to proceed simultaneously along very different goal paths with divergent inputs. The pathetically modifier-overloaded Macintosh primary mouse button is a classic example of how Too Much Simplicity can become a very bad thing.
Everything should be made as simple as possible but not simpler - Albert Einstein
Da Blog
What is with the need for a docking station? Seriously, I don't get it. And I have both a ThinkPad (now mostly retired) and an MBP and I've never felt the need to plug either into a docking station.
I shlep the MBP to work, and I plug in one USB cable which connects to a keyboard (the mouse connects to the keyboard's hub), the Ethernet cable and the power supply. When it's time to go home, I unplug. At home, I do the same thing (I have two power supplies).
I used to do the same thing with the ThinkPad, 'cept I shlepped the power supply because I only had one.
I really don't get the docking station thing.
Another Cisco Mac user here - been using one for more than 4 years. I don't even have a Windows VM any more and make do with the pain that is Entourage.
Cisco is moving its business to not depend on any particular platform and we run community supported Ubuntu, SuSE, CentOS, OS X, Windows 7 and more builds internally, as well as instructional wiki's and mirrors. In addition, you can always fall back to the IT supported Windows XP images.
It works really well and it's incredibly empowering to just run whatever tools you want to get your job done - this isn't an exclusive club either - this is everyone from sales guys, SE's, coders and more. At our frequent tech meetings I'm betting at least a quarter the users are not running Windows in the room (most using OS X these days).
Really, Cisco should be seen as a model for other companies to mirror their (very large scale) IT ideology from. I'm convinced that the productivity and employee satisfaction from being able to use a Mac or a non-IT Windows platform pays for itself tenfold.
Now there's one hoopy frood who really knows where his towel is!
They've got almost everything except security down. Add a few more ways to lock down the systems, and add real WOL (that wakes from off state, not just sleep), and they're good to go.
Well, name some numbers as to what is "very small." I've been at businesses with 30-something employees where we had some pretty powerful hardware. If you're an enterprise software ISV startup, you may very reasonably want this caliber of hardware, though you'd almost certainly do better to go with a Linux solution. A small video production and CGI shop, on the other hand, sounds like a very good candidate for this level of Apple-branded hardware.
Are you adequate?
Really, whats up with that?
The biggest feature of my work laptop is that I have docking stations at home and work for it. Exactly how hard is it to do? Is Apple afraid of a connector blemishing their cases?
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
I know a Chair of a math department of one of the largest schools in the united states. They switched from mostly wintel/linux machines to macintosh for staff and any professors who don't specifically request otherwise and it cut their IT maintenance down to almost nothing and after a period of retraining most have expressed being much happier with the Macs. The Chair has 4 or 5 Macs (which synchronize using Mobile Me, which seems to be enough for him) and he swears he will never go back to Windows.
There is no such thing as an enterprise-level fart app. There, I've said it, there's no unsaying it. You were thinking it, mouthing the words, hov
Businesses demand a lot of esoteric features
What? Look at the enterprise-marketed laptop lines for a great example of what corporations want. They're not "esoteric" by any stretch.
Way to prove you don't work in IT, much less corporate level. We care about things like price, TCO, parts availability, interchangeability of accessories (within reason), and management.
Meanwhile, consumers want just about everything under the sun.
and are concerned with getting the cheapest hardware possible.
Purchase price is not the ultimate concern, no- ballpark is important, yes. Again, way to prove you don't work in IT. I've never had a boss that said "well, this $3000 server is $300 cheaper than the other one, so we're going to get that, even though it doesn't have IPMI and we have no in-house experience with this brand, and their support contract is 8hr, not 4hr."
They have no desire or tolerance for "cool" Completely not the market Apple is going for.
It's not a matter of "cool". It's a matter that Apple likes consumers because they're easily pushed around and they CONSUME. And if you think companies don't want "Cool", you haven't seen a CEO of a million dollar company get handed his new Blackberry (hell hath no fury if it works more poorly than the old one, however.)
Corporations say, "Hey. Why did you just change the display port AGAIN? Now half of our 2000 member sales force have a different display port from the other half." Or, "why are all of our iMacs developing vertical lines? Our CEO's secretary has gone through two machines in a month and he's raising hell because they can't work. Don't you people have any quality control? Send us some goddamn WORKING computers or we buy Dell from now on. That's straight from the CEO's mouth."
Corporations have legal departments, so that when machines die, lawyers say "give us our money back or we seek damages." Consumers just bitch and moan on online forums- and purchase decisions are more rational in corporations (heh, I can't believe I just said that, but I mean they're not *emotional*.)
Corporations say "Oh, Macbook Pros are $2k? Well, we're buying 100 of them this month, and we've given you $500k in business this quarter. So, how about $1700?". Consumers just hand over their CC.
Corporations say, "If a laptop breaks, we want someone to come in and fix it. And if you won't, we want to be able to train our own IT staff in how to fix them and be able to order parts." Apple a)won't let you order parts unless you're a reseller, b)won't do on-site service of anything except Mac Pros and Xserves. Ever spent your day standing in line at the Genius Bar with a laptop belonging to a CEO of a $50M company because that was the best support option, and then arguing with some pimply-faced "Genius" who is used to talking to grandmas about why their gumdrop iMac is dead?
In big Apple-using companies I've worked at, we kept every single machine that died and cannibalized them for parts for the other ones, because we couldn't get the goddamn parts from Apple, couldn't get service manuals, couldn't train CSRs.
Meanwhile, HP, Dell, IBM, Sun will all happily take our precious dollars and promise that if anything breaks in my shiny server or desktop, I'll have a replacement part sitting on my desk in FOUR HOURS. They'll let almost anyone order parts, and happily train people in how to repair their products. And if a laptop breaks, they'll come out and service it on the spot if you bought that support plan, so our CEO doesn't have to be without his laptop while it gets shipped to fucking TEXAS, the only place you can get a Macbook Pro repaired if it's anything remotely complicated (the Apple Store can do drive replacements, that's about it.)
I had to replace two failed drives on an HP server once (one system drive, one data array drive.) I said "I have red lights, they were kicked out of the array by the controller." We had a 4 hour support contr
Please help metamoderate.
Well, Apple could kill iTunes for windows. Oh wait, that would trash their music sales and crack the iPhone ecosystem. Yes, you are probably right.
Or, Apple has looked around at the hardware guys in the business space and realized the margins are shit in that little race to the bottom.
Plus, there's a long term play that says software costs will go to near zero and hardware and support is where all the money will be, and margins are shit in hardware, and support is a cartel of sysadmins...
Interstitial spaces are filled with cream.
" Create it in Office 2000, move it to another Office 2000 machine, characters are screwed up. It's even worse with 2000/2003/2007"
Wow, you have weird problems in your company. Where I work we have several hundred PCs, and users exchange documents all day long, it is a huge part of what they do. Different versions of office also. I can honestly say that no one experiences these weird corruption problems you speak of. Sounds like you have something else going on, what makes you so sure it is the PCs and not something else? This is not a common problem at all....
http://www.theonion.com/content/video/apple_introduces_revolutionary
I like my dinosaurs feathery, and my pterosaurs hairy (or is it pycnofibery?)
Apple locks down your devices for you, Microsoft allows you to to lock down your software.
Big difference there.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
I have been making statements and observations similar to this article and time after time, I get modded -1 troll after about two or three hours... of course initially modded +5 insightful prior to that.
I think it has been plainly obvious that Apple doesn't care to be a business powerhouse at any level. I think perhaps it is a responsibility (read: liability) they don't want to manage. I tend to think of Jobs as the computer world's George Lucas. Everyone loves what he can do, but every time we see something with serious potential, he throws some sort of Jar-Jar monkey wrench into the works that prevents the newest iProduct from being accepted by the largest consumer of PCs... business.
Because it's true, Apple values Apple's control over your Apple products over anything else.
/. would be better.
But the truth is not valued by apple fanboys and its already been modded down. If we could have a "-1 Fanboy doesnt like" mod
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
My employer has one of those "Enterprise class" IT departments. I use the phrase in quotes, because if Captain Kirk had this type of IT support on the Enterprise, Star Trek TNG would be entirely in Klingon. My wife and kids have better, more reliable networks and PC applications -- running from my HOME. At work, we suffer along with an Exchange server that takes a day off every so often. File servers are a hit-or-miss proposition. We have measurable packet loss on our own LAN! Websense blocks us from legitimate business sites. Meanwhile, the computers are locked down in such a way that half the time the automatic updates to corporate-supplied software die for lack of privileges -- but spyware plays right through.
When corporate IT simplifies its approach and cuts the MS-inspired complexity, they will discover the appeal of Macs. But not until. If Apple were to try and make the Mac as "administrator-friendly" as a PC, it would be no better than a PC. It is not easy to justify premium pricing if your product suffers from the same disease as lowball competitors.
That's because everyone's playing games on the Windows machines.
The mini is already a pretty decent system -- and you can't possibly convince me that the mini is $1k more than a comparable PC. (And if you CAN find a PC for $1k less than that, lemme know -- I want about thirty thousand of them.)
I dunno, I build my own machines from parts sometimes, but if I just wanted another desktop, I'd get a mini. Even if I was gonna run Windows on it; I'd still rather just get a mini, since it's small, cheap, quiet, and no-effort.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
I would love to replace my POS HP cheap as dirt laptop with my sweet MB Pro. I would even furnish the computer myself, so they would save the $1000 on the laptop. And in fact there is a few brave souls using Macs, some of them even dual booting when required (see below). I am seriously considering joining them when my lease is next up. I have seen the next generation laptops that are coming in to the corporation and the machine is not faster and has an annoying refresh entire screen every 30 seconds.
This company is standardized on XP and explorer 6 with Lotus Notes. We are in a "tight controlled" network. You get software patches 3x week and you have to accept. We have virus software that prevents us from using our science instruments any more without an IT intervention. The computer takes 8 minutes to boot up and 5 minutes to shut down. All internal "paperwork" requires IE6, not even Firefox allowed. Telcons require you "see" the screen of others, requiring IE6... you get the picture. We are considering Win7 (never got to Vista, in fact we removed the preloaded Vista and put on XP) but will still need a year to work on the bugs.
If the lack of IE6 was not enough there are some specialized software that is not on the Mac. This is where dual booting would work, but I would have to become the dual boot expert, don't expect any help. Lotus updates Notes on the Mac so slowly that there would be periods of goofiness during the lag time. Also, they like the straight jacket they can put on our computers, I wonder if the Mac and even be constrained in a similar manner?
In their minds this is the cheapest solution, maybe so as they would screw up a Mac installation as they have screwed up the XP computers . It would require switching completely to Mac to regain the comfort level. But that seems unlikely. But then h-e-l-l is close to freezing over outside.
I use a two-button mouse on my Mac, so I don't have that problem. But I do like not having to explain two buttons to my 92-year-old grandmother on her iMac.
Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe you're the type that likes the 200+ button remote control that can change any setting on any AV device in your house. I happen to really like the iPhone's simplicity and the way they kept all the UI inside the screen, leaving only volume, mute, on/off, and home buttons.
E pluribus unum
But reports created on 2003 two days ago, into Windows-based document control, and try to extract them today, completely hosed.
There is your problem. I'm not sure Microsoft has ever made a good document/source control program. Ever. Their source control programs are only good when compared the the previous Microsoft release.
meh
This has been the differentiating factor of Macs vs PCs for pretty much ever.
Why is this news now?
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
It's not like Apple couldn't build business computers. For example I have an old G3 somewhere around which is just very easy to maintain.
However the refusal of Apple to accept the business market causes them to not be taken seriously in terms of quality. When I buy a consumer product, I know it won't work. I know that it will have GPU fans, cables held by cable straps and capacitors rated for 1000 hour use. I have seen it many times with consumer computers.
Now Apple also had it's "consumer moments". Just think of the many "logic board failures" it had in the past. (my iBook G3 had 3 of them in 3 years!) It would be great if Apple had a product line geared towards businesses where you could be sure, the quality would be alright.
And please, Apple, stop manufacturing in China. China is great for simple things, but they really don't care very much about quality.We once made them do a couple of coaxial cables and none of them worked.
It's all about strategies. For many years (before it started with its entertainment division), MS essentially followed the opposite strategy. It made windos so obiquituous in business that people were expected to know it if they wanted a job, so lots of people bought a computer for home, which of course (thanks to OEM deals) came with windos. Closed ecosystem.
Apple approaches the same thing from the opposite direction, it assumes that even corporations are made up out of humans and that it is humans who make the decisions. So people who enjoy Macs at home bring them into the company - I've seen that happen on many occasions.
btw: You can get enterprise support for Mac hardware and software. Just not from Apple directly, but many of their partners will be happy to fill that niche.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Apple does not want to market to businesses because businesses will demand sensible prices. Businesses won't pay the Mac be-cool prices. Once Apple products are sold for sensible prices, everyone will want those prices.
Apple didn't call the origional iPhone pre SDK a smartphone.
Nonsense. Firstly "smartphone" is ill-defined - the difference between "smart" and "feature" is just one for marketing convenience to distinguish the current high end from low end
No, the difference is a practical one, A smartphone is a mobile phone that allows native third party apps. Feature phones don't.
If you don't get that the Mac with OS X saves you time and money and increases productivity compared to a PC with Windows by now then that's your problem. You can help the ignorant but not the stupid, not the completely disfunctional. There are thousands of examples like Genentech where Mac minis replaced Dell towers and millions of dollars were saved and productivity soared. The message has been sent. Many simply are not listening.
I'm working in the I-T group for a huge multinational that is 98% Windows, and me and my co-workers all have Macs at home, and so do most users. But the guy making the buying decisions only knows Microsoft. He does not even know anything about the Web. He's a middle manager guy, not a technologist. Nobody is home. There is no decision-making about I-T except when do we roll out the next Microsoft patch? They still run IE6. They spend months deciding what icons will appear on a user's desktop when they get it. They have no idea what their users do or how to help them be productive. The big issue now is how to convince users they want Windows 7 enough for them to learn it. They're not rolling out better tools, they're propagandizing the next Microsoft thing. You can't help people like that.
Why is native so important? Supposing a high end phone came out that had all the bells and whistles of the high end smart phones today, but used a byte code system rather than native code. Are you saying it wouldn't be a smart phone? Indeed, this is how Android primarily works - are you saying if they dropped the ability for native code, it would stop being a smart phone?
That's a poor definition. And you know it - if the Iphone instead used a byte code language rather than native, but had all the other features, people here would still be hailing it as a wonderful smartphone, and claiming how revolutionary it was not to be using native code.
Still, even if we accept that definition, my point is still true. There is no evidence that the Iphone has drive sales of phones that run applications natively (hell, most users wouldn't see the difference between whether it's native code or whatever, as long as it's an application). That's a fact, supported by the market figures - but since the facts don't fit with the pro-Apple mod's worldview, they get modded down, as always.
One thing that would be great is if Apple would customize their computers for their corporate and government clients, since all of our Macs have to be modified to remove cameras, WiFi, etc.
And that customization would cost more money and create more headaches for Apple, which they apparently want to avoid.
I can't say I blame them - if I had my own business, I think I'd avoid the red tape involved in selling to the government.
"My God...it's full of trolls!"
I'm sorry, but you're not allowed to redefine the dictionary like that. The iPhone is called a smartphone on many tech blogs, CNN, etc. If you have a hangup over that, calling it a feature-phone doesn't change that fact.
Agreed. I prefer Macs myself, but I've never had to work in a Windows environment which is as screwed up as what OP describes. And why are they still using Office 2000?
One thing that would be great is if Apple would customize their computers for their corporate and government clients, since all of our Macs have to be modified to remove cameras, WiFi, etc.
This is actually done by opening all devices and removing the hardware? Thus voiding the warranty?
You guys cannot handle that through S/W?
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
am also still running Outlook under virtualization; enterprise messaging on the Mac is currently not very good
Why not use MS Entourage?
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
Apple courting IT people is a losing battle for a couple of reasons. First, a large number of IT people drink daily at the Kool-Aid fountains of Microsoft so to them, anything else is an "also ran". Second, the IT support requirements of Windows environments are far more than that of Apple environments but the heads of IT departments don't care about saving money as much as they do about increasing their headcount. Running a larger department gives the department head more clout in the company. This has been my experience working for a Fortune 500 company.
I find this question to be extremely easy to answer. Whats worse is I only support 10 of them and come across things on a daily basis that I would never have to even think twice about answering if the same task can be accomplished in windows. The answer is they simply aren't ready for business so they don't market toward business.
Here's just one shining example: Accounting on Xerox copiers isn't correctly supported.
am also still running Outlook under virtualization; enterprise messaging on the Mac is currently not very good
Why not use MS Entourage?
If you've used Entourage, you already know the answer to that question.
There are three main problems with Entourage:
1) Large mail files cause problems with Time Machine backups and Spotlight indexing. When they don't corrupt themselves first.
2) There is no Webex meeting integration with the calendar. I use Webex for meetings several times every day. Meeting invite integration with Webex is must-have functionality for me.
3) It's freaking lavender. LAVENDER!
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
This is actually done by opening all devices and removing the hardware? Thus voiding the warranty?
You guys cannot handle that through S/W?
It can't be done securely through software. Fortunately, a third-party supplier/service center has an agreement with Apple that allows them to make these modifications without voiding the warranty.
No, my point was that there is a minor grievance with Apple's software model, that isn't even really accurate for OS X - it's more a critique of the iPhone OS and app store, and then makes a wildly inaccurate claim that not only are Apple's apps poorly coded, but that they're the only things available for Mac OS X.
I said in my point that there are obviously going to be consenting and dissenting opinions about Apple, but stick to, y'know, actual facts.
It's the equivalent of saying "Open Source apps are just poorly coded software slung together by a bunch of volunteers in the their free time - you get no support, and you're lucky if it'll even run on your distro, and forget a usable UI or any refinement or documentation!"
Slashdot is meant to be populated by nerds who at least use their brains - the original AC post just serves no one, and the mod who gave it a positive score should hand in their geek card at the door.
Had a meeting the other day for a threat risk assessment for an app we are trying to build. I ask the guy "Your a consultant. Are you aware of the corporate security protocols? They are currently causing us some problems." He wanted to know why I knew he was a consultant. I said "Your using a Macbook."
No one in a corporate setting would be using a Macbook. Also when setting up to the projector he made a big deal about it having HDMI ports, to which my response was, "You know it is the exact same thing as DVI except with sound right?"
Funny enough there was no sound in the presentation.
Anyway he did a good job, I am just being smarmy.
Apple is counting on user and group demand to get into business.
For example, they have good traction in some media content departments. Most professional media organizations standardize on a set of tools, and stick with them for decades. If you go to video production houses, you'll generally find they're "Sony shops" or "Panny shops".. they don't mix and match camcorder gear. Same applies to video editing suites and at least OS platforms if not necessarily (on the PC side) PC vendors.
In short, Apple keeps their adherents, and they have virtually no chance of selling Macs to a PC/Vegas, PC/Newtek, or PC/Grass Valley shop, and not a very good chance of selling to PC/Avid or PC/Adobe shop. Similar things in audio work.
Outside of content creation, it's even more difficult. There's lots of talk of corporate email and maybe even desktop apps, and if that's all you're doing throughout your organization, maybe Apple stands a chance. If you're doing software development, sure, you might be able to run on the Mac... at least as a Linux replacement. But once you get to non-FOSS development, you probably can't get that special compiler for a NXP ARM or TI DSP on Mac. Windows may the only target.
Going on to hardware development, it gets even more severe... there are no good hardware tools for MacOS, and for any reasonable hardware development environment, you don't just need one, you need dozens of tools. This is the same reason peopl use Windows and MacOS for media content creation over Linux.. it's not just one tool, it's potentially dozens (I do hardware development, software development, video and music... the PC is the only possible answer).
Now, get back to larger companies.. you have to hire a sysadmin. He may not need to do much in the engineering group, but his department is going to manage computers in marketing, sales, finance, office support, documentation, etc... definitely all the non-tech departments. Unless you can do each and every one of those things on the Mac, the PC wins by default.
And then there's the smart business decision. If I'm building a new company, I need gear. I'd like to establish a relationship with a hardware vendor for any medium sized company or larger. If I pick Apple, I have no recourse... I take what they give me, and that's that. It's an expensive platform shift to move to another platform. If I buy a PC, regardless of the software platform. I can change hardware suppliers any time I like. Which gives me much more leverage with them. So Apple would never be the right answer, from this aspect of the business perspective.
-Dave Haynie
Actually, Apple has bought most of their media content creation software from other companies. These didn't have anything to do with locking out the PC... the PC market is crowded. Yeah, the program that became Final Cut was Macromedia's video editor before Apple bought it. But there are at least a half dozen pro-level video editors on the PC: Media Composer, Premiere, Vegas, EDIUS, SpeedEDIT, eQ/iQ/sQ, etc.
They also bought Emagic.. sure, it was to acquire Logic, and sure, they cancelled the PC version, but it's not as if this was a blow to the even-more-crowded PC audio market. Same goes with the TOW DVD creation companies Apple bought to deliver today's DVD Studio, or any of the others.
Apple started this back in the days when PCs were better than 2x as fast as Macs, period (eg, not just based on prices), and Apple was seriously in danger of losing their media content creation niche. They started becoming another Adobe, in a sense, just to ensure the Mac remained viable, even if companies like Adobe and Avid left the Mac. Which they were.. Adobe was cutting back on Apple support in the latter days of the PPC Mac, and recommending migration to PCs to their customers. Once Apple went to x86, they recanted.. even before Apple as able to regain some installed base.
And while my Apple Fan quotient is zero, I can't support a falsehood... they have evolved most of the programs they have acquired in good if not earthshaking ways. Some of these were bought years back, but they still produce decent new versions. Some of this was smart behavior by Apple.. they kept the original development teams. Same thing Sony did when they bought Sonic Foundry, which has kept me on the Sony tools for my own video and audio work. Those guys were the best in the business on any platform, before Sony, and the remain unequaled (unpaid plug).
Sure, there are other companies still supporting MacOS. If you're doing UNIX stuff, it's pretty simple to support MacOS, and at 5% worldwide, on the desktop, they do represent the largest, if oddest, UNIX-based installed base. Media content creation software companies have to walk a fine line.. the Mac is more viable than it was some years back, which is good. If you have a great new product, they might buy you. But they might also buy your competition. That makes your head explode, in thinking of Mac support versus a presence in the Windows market (eg, is that wasted effort or your exist strategy?)
-Dave Haynie
You clearly have network problems.... I'm no fan of Word (it's a wordprocessor entirely optimize for simple 1-25 page documents and memos), but I've been forced to use it at many companies over the course of my 27 year career, and have not once found anything remotely close to the issues you're describing. Even between mixed versions of Word, and quite often, Open Office.
With that said, I really have problems with the idea of Word Documents being used as the company standard for document distribution. And yet, it's often the standard.
Back in the 90s, while leaving a company to form another, I was writing up a formal document (150+ pages) describing details of the 100,000 line-or-so program I had written during my three years there. I was forced to use Word (our documentation group had revolted and moved to something else, everyone else still used Word), and it was a heinous boondoggle.. barely functional. I would have been better writing it on the Commodore 64... I'm not being satirical. One assumes they have fixed it.
But the proper in-house standard for documentation is PDF. That's the rule I set when I get to make those decisions. Otherwise, individuals or groups use their wordprocessor of course, though these days, I'd demand an ODF file checked in to match that PDF. In the past, as long as the company owned a license for your WP of choice (I found buying you your favorite, versus forcing Word on you, was a no-brainer cost savings, at least where engineers were concerned).
-Dave Haynie
Apple never did business/enterprise correctly, or well.
But they used to be a powerhouse in education. And they're not just losing that market, they're intentionally walking away.
The future trend is one computer per student. They've been doing that at my kids' high school recently. This was completely enabled by the rise of Netbook PCs. Every kid in school borrows a Netbook for the year.... that's possible with $300 Netbooks, impossible based on the lower Apple iBook prices. In fact, Apple's prices are all over crazy... the average price paid for a laptop, excluding netbooks, was about $550, 4Q09. Where is Apple's $500 laptop, much less their $300 laptop. Without they, they're walking away from one of their traditional markets.
My guess is that Apple just doesn't care.. they like the high margins on the Apple laptops.. they're getting twice as much money per computer as Dell, HP, Lenovo, Sony, Toshiba, etc. That's got to feel good, but also, I think Apple doesn't quite believe that the Mac is their future.
-Dave Haynie
WTF are you talking about ME redefining the dictionary? I gave the definition of a smartphone used in the industry. Tech blogs getting their terminology wrong is no concern of mine. As I said, Apple never marketed it as a smartphone. They just called it a phone.
I didnlt say it was important. Only that it forms part of the definition of a smartphone. The part that differentiates it from a feature phone. The difference is of course that native apps allow third party apps to have the same look and feel and much of the functionality if the built in apps. Which doesn't tend to happen with non-native platforms.
Depends if the built in apps also use the same byte code and API as tird parties have to. If they do, then it's native, and it's a smartphone. If not it's a feature phone.
Yes.
No, it's a definition that for some reason you don't like. Perhaps you've never come across it before. But it is the correct one used in the industry.
I couldn't give a flying fuck about what other people on here call it any more than I care about your feeling for what a smartphone should be. The definition of a smartphone is the same. For the first year, until the release of an SDK, the iPhone didn't qualify as a smartphone. If it changed as you describe it would not be a smartphone. But as it is right now it qualifies as a smartphone.
They would notice that thired party apps weren't as good as the built in ones. They wouldn't know why.
If you post drivel like thats that's why you're getting modded down, not because of some conspiracy.
You're not wrong, but you're not right, either. You vote for one approach. I vote for another. There is lots of room in the world for experimentation.
Your mouse button hatred is a complex phenomenon. Apple first went for a consistent design that called for standardized menus to accomplish anything. One button was all you needed for a long time. If you found yourself doing a repetitive motion, you opened the menu and found the Command-key combination. Right-clicks slowly began to intrude from the Windows world, and eventually this was dropped in favor of the Apple mouse designs that are, in fact, two-button or three-button mice. They were demanded by the Windows refugees, because they're used to that, and for no other reason. The newer mice are great, in my experience, except for the tiny nipple roller ball, which get clogged too frequently. I'm now using a Magic mouse, which has a mulitouch-type roller pad, and yes, both left and right click. I really love it. And of course, it's never mentioned by mouse haters that you can use any USB mouse that's on the market, most of which you don't need a special driver for. My Microsoft Mouse works fine, too.
Meanwhile, the right-click-slide-drag world of Windows has one big defect. When you're a bit lost about how to do something, on the Mac you can look through the menus to find out most things. When you're giving your developers free rein to put essential commands on a right click, you make them invisible. I'll cite as an example my long attempt to alphabetize the bookmarks in IE. I searched the menus, nothing. I looked at the menu dialog, and I could find no little button there. Add, subtract bookmarks, clean up the listing, that's it. I actually read somewhere that you right click in the open menu to do that. Weird. How would I have guessed that?
No interface is perfect, but the one-button mouse was a noble effort done for a reason, to keep the interface clear for everyone.
You are forgetting to add the cost of yearly virus checking software subscription. And if you have had the same windows box without a single re-build I might not think you are telling the truth. You probably do one of those about once every 18 months.
I will add to that, that you never know what product line Apple will drop next. And if you need to plan your enterprise infrastructure for more than 5 years, you are screwed with Apple. Microsoft at least lies when it comes to new functionality, but Apple just stays quiet.
Corporations say, "If a laptop breaks, we want someone to come in and fix it. And if you won't, we want to be able to train our own IT staff in how to fix them and be able to order parts." Apple a)won't let you order parts unless you're a reseller, b)won't do on-site service of anything except Mac Pros and Xserves. Ever spent your day standing in line at the Genius Bar with a laptop belonging to a CEO of a $50M company because that was the best support option, and then arguing with some pimply-faced "Genius" who is used to talking to grandmas about why their gumdrop iMac is dead?
In big Apple-using companies I've worked at, we kept every single machine that died and cannibalized them for parts for the other ones, because we couldn't get the goddamn parts from Apple, couldn't get service manuals, couldn't train CSRs.
Meanwhile, HP, Dell, IBM, Sun will all happily take our precious dollars and promise that if anything breaks in my shiny server or desktop, I'll have a replacement part sitting on my desk in FOUR HOURS. They'll let almost anyone order parts, and happily train people in how to repair their products. And if a laptop breaks, they'll come out and service it on the spot if you bought that support plan, so our CEO doesn't have to be without his laptop while it gets shipped to fucking TEXAS, the only place you can get a Macbook Pro repaired if it's anything remotely complicated (the Apple Store can do drive replacements, that's about it.)
This is the real issue. Support. We have a relatively large number of users (including the CEO) that like Mac's, mainly MacBooks (we have around a 100 Mac users). We can't get decent support from Apple. Period. At least not in the Netherlands, maybe somewhere else. The difference with Lenovo, Dell or HP is staggering. I also use a Nac myself, but I shudder at the idea it might break and I might be without it for days or weeks.
RogerWilco the Adventurous Janitor
I hate to break it to ya, pal, but a university is not really comparable to a commercial enterprise in terms of how computers are used. I work for a top-tier management consultancy with a few thousand employees -- the support includes 24/6 first-line phone guys who use Bomgar for remote sessions, second-line phone support to handle the many highly complex support jobs that come in (often involving sodding Notes, natch) as well as a 6 to 7 person local IT desk in every office to ensure that hardware can be replaced quickly if need be. Behind the scenes and invisible to users are large numbers of corporate IT guys who maintain the servers, build new apps, test deployments etc etc. What kills corporate machines and makes the support load heavy is: networking incl VPN, security, enterprise apps, and the pounding of users. Wouldn't make much difference if it were Macs or PCs, it's the needs of enterprise computing that drive the size of the support.