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Corporate Mac Sales Surge 66%
syngularyx writes "Mac sales in the enterprise during Apple's last fiscal quarter grew a whopping 66 percent, significantly outpacing the rest of the PC market, which grew just 4.5 percent in the enterprise. The data from Apple's previous fiscal quarter was highlighted on Friday by analyst Charlie Wolf with Needham & Company. He said though he originally viewed success in the enterprise as a "one-quarter blip," it now appears to be a "durable platform" for Apple."
What makes this especially interesting is that Apple apparently isn't looking for corporate sales, and considers them "collateral success" rather than an indication that they should market specifically to corporate buyers.
The 27" iMac is pretty hard to beat. Consider that a 27" IPS 2560x1440 screen is about $1000 to start with (hell, dell's more expensive than apple on this one), that gets you a small, quiet, mid range i5 system with a real graphics card for $700... It's not unbeatable, but it's a reasonable price.
Is that a troll question, as in rhetorically expecting an answer in the negative?
Mac OS X has ACL built in:
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=2005050120073947
-dZ.
Carol vs. Ghost
For what you pay Apple for a three year support contract which requires you to send the machine in or bring it in, you get onsite service for the same period from pretty much any other vendor. I live on a one-lane road in the back of beyond and HP sent a technician to work on my laptop even though I'm three hours away from the place from which they sent him. Of course, he did actually manage to break the laptop further, but Apple is capable of doing the same thing and I should probably thank him because I ended up getting a better one as a replacement.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Which is why this is such a big story. Apple made a jump like this while having sub-par service and expending absolutely ZERO effort at marketing to corporations. They even quit making the XServe and XServe RAID. So why the jump in sales?
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
No, the reason that they're doing it this way, according to most educated guesses, is that SMART status while standard is a little unreliable sometimes, and you really don't want to be polling it all the time, and in the prior iMac (2009-2010) they used a specific special cable that was different for each manufacturer's drive (and they use about 4 different makes in the iMac line - including Seagate - they don't claim to know more than them, they simply ask Seagate and others for a drive that has specifications they can use, in this case a custom firmware that makes the drive more useful to them).
What they then did was repurpose the LED access light connector, which they don't use (there's no external LED HD light on the iMac) and used the signals for temperature sensing. What this means is that they can simply use one connector (the same connector) regardless of what drive they install, streamlining inventory and assembly. Since it was never designed for user service, they didn't see it as a downside that it was a non-standard method.
Now, having personally upgraded the HD in my own 20" white Intel iMac, I wish they'd made it possible for me to do without jumping through hoops if I upgrade to one of these machines (my white iMac simply has a temperature sensor that attaches to the outside of the drive, so you just transfer it to the new one), but I'm sure it won't be long before some third party solution comes along to cure it. Apple's own documentation mentions shorting that line out if an SSD is installed in that bay instead of a spinning drive, for example, and I'm sure they are looking at what some third party shops are doing - they released firmware for the 2011 iMacs that enabled full 6GBs speed on 2 of the 3 SATA busses, for example, despite not shipping any BTO parts that could use it, ostensibly after OWC said "hey, it would be cool to put our SATA 3 SSDs in here!"
The iMac is a big laptop, essentially, so I expect it to come with various issues like this. It's no different from a custom logic board and PSU. It will be documented and worked out soon - likely using Apple's own documentation.
If they're so determined to force the upsell, you think they'd have stuck to having the CPU soldered onto the board though, eh? As it is now, this is one of the first times in the iMac they've gone for a socketed stock CPU. I'm not sure anyone has attempted to put in anything different, but no doubt it will be tried soon. The GPU is also on an external card that is clearly a board made by AMD. It's obviously custom and thus not upgradable easily, but the door does remain open for the possibility of changing it out in the future - even if it's only for one of the more powerful cards currently in the lineup (like the one in the top spec 27"),