who worked on the death star. Tell us the story of how those contracts came in, and follow these contractors through to the destruction of the second death star. Perhaps Randall will stop ranting about how they were innocent bystanders in this conflict.
Common Problem. At my previous job (won't go into details), I encountered this problem at least 500 times. I got to the point where I could replace an iBook's logic board without even looking. It's about time someone holds them accountable for it.
The iBooks were machines that were great so long as they never left a desk. The internal design was such that you have screws going in opposing directions, and failure by screws coming loose and coming in contact with important components was inevitable. Fortunately, with the 13" MacBook, these issues have been addressed - all the screws are going in one direction as the machine is now using a tub based design (as has been used on the aluminum powerbooks and macbook pro's). Also, with the 13" macbooks, changing out the hard drive is dead simple. I wouldn't be surprised if the next revision of the MacBook Pro had a similar arrangement for the hard drive.
I've been working on enterprise level support of Macs for a few years now. The last job was supporting a 1k unit deployment of iBooks, aluminum powerbooks, and iMacs in a k12 environment. Now, I'm supporting a 250+ unit deployment of various macs in a research environment. If you have a good local Apple reseller/service provider locally - getting prompt, efficient service isn't difficult. (taking machines to the apple store or sending to apple's svc depots is not the quickest way to get things taken care of).
With the users at my current work environment, I am seeing users migrate to the new intel based macs on a weekly basis. Since windows can be run (either natively or through virtualization) - no end user loses capability or compatibility. On the whole, MacBook Pros and iMacs are proving to be apple's best values. With any piece of equipment - the three year applecare agreement isn't terribly expensive and provides end users with the sense of security they need. I recommend it.
As for the common sentiment about Macs not being upgradeable, it's not as bad as it was. Granted, on the laptops, iMacs, and Mac Minis, you won't be able to upgrade the graphics, but memory, hard drive, and the optical drive can be upgraded. On the iMacs and Mac Minis, the CPU is socketed - so the CPU can easily be upgraded. Sure, you can't change the motherboard - but can that really be done on any of the machines you typically see in an enterprise environment. How often are computers really upgraded in an enterprise environment? In my career (doing both mac and pc stuff), computers are replaced within 3 years instead of upgrading at any of the enterprise level employers I've worked at - so lack of hardware upgradeability really isn't such a liability there.
Now, my big issue with Apple has been the server. The Xserve is a great machine, but it is far too limited. There aren't enough PCI slots. Since fibre channel is not onboard, there goes one pci slot, if you need scsi - there's the other. Now, if you need another fibre channel card, or another network card on top of this, you're going to be in a tight spot - you have no more room to grow. If there was a 2U or 3U Xserve with more PCI slots and drive bays, there would be a stronger argument for Apple taking the enterprise market seriously. The Xserve is far more limited than many Windows based servers from IBM, HP, and Dell, and almost laughable compared to some of the UNIX based offerings from IBM and Sun. (despite being cheaper)
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who worked on the death star. Tell us the story of how those contracts came in, and follow these contractors through to the destruction of the second death star. Perhaps Randall will stop ranting about how they were innocent bystanders in this conflict.
Common Problem. At my previous job (won't go into details), I encountered this problem at least 500 times. I got to the point where I could replace an iBook's logic board without even looking. It's about time someone holds them accountable for it.
The iBooks were machines that were great so long as they never left a desk. The internal design was such that you have screws going in opposing directions, and failure by screws coming loose and coming in contact with important components was inevitable. Fortunately, with the 13" MacBook, these issues have been addressed - all the screws are going in one direction as the machine is now using a tub based design (as has been used on the aluminum powerbooks and macbook pro's). Also, with the 13" macbooks, changing out the hard drive is dead simple. I wouldn't be surprised if the next revision of the MacBook Pro had a similar arrangement for the hard drive. I've been working on enterprise level support of Macs for a few years now. The last job was supporting a 1k unit deployment of iBooks, aluminum powerbooks, and iMacs in a k12 environment. Now, I'm supporting a 250+ unit deployment of various macs in a research environment. If you have a good local Apple reseller/service provider locally - getting prompt, efficient service isn't difficult. (taking machines to the apple store or sending to apple's svc depots is not the quickest way to get things taken care of). With the users at my current work environment, I am seeing users migrate to the new intel based macs on a weekly basis. Since windows can be run (either natively or through virtualization) - no end user loses capability or compatibility. On the whole, MacBook Pros and iMacs are proving to be apple's best values. With any piece of equipment - the three year applecare agreement isn't terribly expensive and provides end users with the sense of security they need. I recommend it. As for the common sentiment about Macs not being upgradeable, it's not as bad as it was. Granted, on the laptops, iMacs, and Mac Minis, you won't be able to upgrade the graphics, but memory, hard drive, and the optical drive can be upgraded. On the iMacs and Mac Minis, the CPU is socketed - so the CPU can easily be upgraded. Sure, you can't change the motherboard - but can that really be done on any of the machines you typically see in an enterprise environment. How often are computers really upgraded in an enterprise environment? In my career (doing both mac and pc stuff), computers are replaced within 3 years instead of upgrading at any of the enterprise level employers I've worked at - so lack of hardware upgradeability really isn't such a liability there. Now, my big issue with Apple has been the server. The Xserve is a great machine, but it is far too limited. There aren't enough PCI slots. Since fibre channel is not onboard, there goes one pci slot, if you need scsi - there's the other. Now, if you need another fibre channel card, or another network card on top of this, you're going to be in a tight spot - you have no more room to grow. If there was a 2U or 3U Xserve with more PCI slots and drive bays, there would be a stronger argument for Apple taking the enterprise market seriously. The Xserve is far more limited than many Windows based servers from IBM, HP, and Dell, and almost laughable compared to some of the UNIX based offerings from IBM and Sun. (despite being cheaper)