Macs are 3 times cheaper to own than Windows PCs, says IBM's IT guy
finance.yahoo.com
finance.yahoo.com
I can believe that the Mac hardware is more reliable. However, a lot of help desk calls I remember making were because some legacy software wasn't working which wasn't directly related to Windows, e.g. I can't read my lotus notes mail because there's a problem with my remote mailbox configuration. I'd like to know if those calls get marked as a PC problem.
I'm sure much less of the legacy software runs on Mac and therefore they get fewer help desk calls related to it.
It wouldn't be very surprising that technical departments had less help-desk complaints than non technical departments.
I'll never forget his name for that reason alone. He was, and I imagine still is, a serious drain on the support staff.
Totally brilliant though.
Idk, I've seen a lot of dev guys try a lot of fruitless troubleshooting on systems when it would have been better to blow away the entire install and load up only necessary components...the troubleshooting cost a lot more because of the disparity in their paycheck and the revenue they brought in vs. the IT departments. The IT department should want calls since it reduces the disparity in earned department revenue, better showing the value of IT staff. Unless there isn't interdepartment accounting, in which case 'screw those time wasters, lol'.
His group was also the company's moonshot offshoot project -- not bringing in the bread and butter of the business.
It's more that organisations demand that windows, which they understand, be configured in a specific manner.
Some might say "ah well you've got to have A-V on windows or you get malware", but at actual technical level there's not a lot of reasons that MacOS is less susceptible to malware than Windows, and indeed its rise in popularity has seen more emerge
That's why companies like Disney and Google have to build their own systems management tools. I could not imagine running a financial services house, an insurance company or a warehouse without Windows.
Even simple software like remote desktop does not exist on the Mac. Yes the Mac has screen sharing but it is nowhere as good as remote desktop.
There aren't many things that Windows does better than Mac, but in my opinion, RDP is definitely one of them.
Please ignore the other fact that I stated about how big companies have to build their own systems management frameworks for the Mac though. And I think you probably know that there is a ton of other software that just does not exist for the Mac. So you're going to end up writing your own and that is definitely not cheaper than buying it off the shelf and many many many cases.
You can always use VNC to connect to a Mac, though that's not the best tool. If you're deploying and managing more than 10 or so Macs, the price for JAMF or other tools isn't an issue.
The performance gap is very noticeable even on GB LAN, especially as the screen resolution goes up. There were a couple of products on Mac that were almost as fast as Windows RDP, but they weren't cheap, and one of the two major companies (iRapp from CodeRebel [1]) went out of business earlier this year. I can't remember the name of the second company, but I think it came from an academia background.
I find that hard to believe, I can play games like Rayman (that require reflexes and a low latency) over my steam link on a 100mbit network. Surely on a GB LAN there shouldn't be noticeable latency?
I've played games via VNC, but only visual novels. In all cases i've known real games require special transmission protocols, which operate in a specific domain, and are a lot faster than RDP, which operates in a broader domain, and is faster than VNC, which is the most general solution.
... at $809 a seat. I mean, just, ouch.
https://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msusa/en_US/cat/Office-...
> Even simple software like remote desktop does not exist on the Mac.
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/microsoft-remote-desktop/id7...
https://www.apple.com/remotedesktop/
Where on earth did you come up with this belief?
Also for anybody suggesting team viewer… Come on that's a ridiculously expensive package that does not even work as well and it's not ubiquitous.
What are you talking about? Here are five ways:
https://www.raymond.cc/blog/remote-access-apple-mac-os-x-via...
TL;DR: Turn on the built-in open standard VNC server on the Mac, use a VNC client on Windows:
Mac OS X actually comes with a built-in remote management feature that allows other computers on the local network to access the Apple computer using the Apple Remote Desktop which we mentioned earlier. However, there is a setting where you can allow third party VNC viewers to connect and control the Apple computer. First click on the System Preferences icon at the Dock and click on Sharing. Click on the checkbox for the Remote Management to turn on the service.
Click on Computer Settings button. Tick on the “VNC viewers may control screen with password” and type in a password. Click OK to save the changes...
Trouble is your typical Windows PCs have a whole lot more 3rd party software (AV, Encryption, r likes of tanium , firewalls you name it.) And they do more too - whether or not the employees actually need that stuff. Most support calls are direct result of stuff like that - firewall blocked my program, AD password issues, antivirus causing CPU burn etc.
Most common: Printers, VPN, windows updates glitch could cause hours to reverse. Symantec AV is still unreliable or broken that it didn't update it definition and apply different access permissions to network drive/software take hours to approve.
Included hardware faulty and seriously parts can drag from days to months due to shortage.
Self services software is a good features which windows does not provide except 3rd parties.
Separate from the Mac stuff, the IT folks were working on web/app based solutions (web email access vs notes, etc). So that has softened some of the transition headaches. If some mac notes fix breaks, you've got the web and smartphone reader backups.
All that got formalized into a "real" organization but it was really several years of trench Mac advocacy + webification that makes the numbers look so good now.
I have to laugh at anyone who thinks Windows would be comparable or cheaper in cost to a Mac. Everyday, I hear a continual litany of woe and despair from our helpdesk about drivers, and anti-virus, and AD issues etc ad infinitum.
Fortunately for me, my only interaction with the "Windows" environment is via SMB to our fileservers. This works reasonably well. The rest of our applications are either Java based, have a web interface, or use a console. My immediate coworkers are all sysadmins with years of experience, and even they still have to cope with BSODs, crashing applications, and all the usual crap that Windows users continue to put up with.
It's sad; they actually think it's normal. I run into the same issue when they talk about Windows server issues (I admin the *nix systems). They don't believe me when I say I don't run into issue xyz...
Sounds like human error to me. My two young children seem to handle Windows just fine without me having to constantly monitor their machines.
Edit: what? my anecdotal evidence isn't as good as everybody else?
It lines up pretty perfectly with my experience swapping in Ubuntu for Mac OS. When I have a problem I can troubleshoot it down to a specific line of code or piece of hardware, on windows.... well, I would rather not troubleshoot anything on windows.
Also, I'm fairly certain drivers and anti-virus is not exclusive to the corporate environment.
Active Directory is a good example, there's no necessity to add a windows system to an Active Directory, and if a company is going down a less centrally controlled model, which includes things like MacOS systems, it would make sense to not force the Windows boxes to log in to AD.
Personally, I've run Windows/MacOS and Linux for a reasonable number of years and I wouldn't say that one was necessarily vastly more stable that the others (assuming current software)
What I do see is that a lot of "traditional corporate" systems get loaded down with additional layers of software which can cause issues, remove that and I think you have a less crashy experience, regardless of the underlying OS.
What I've found over the past 18 years is that Apple is the best at creating an environment where I can install dev or media artist stuff, keep up to date with the latest software and OS, and it all just works -- no WTF moments or frustration. (With the one stark exception of Apple's CoreStorage volume management system.)
That said, Apple's OS has also been getting less dev friendly and more consumer oriented in recent years.
My guess is that most consumers will end up running and iOS like managed environment in the next 5 years or so and more technical people will end up running Linux.
My point being, I don't think it's so much a difference between the Operating systems but how they're operated.
From buggy unsigned drivers, to crapware for security/etc, I stabilized my machine by uninstalling a bunch of things that should never have been in the standard image. If you compare the PC vs MAC images at the last couple companies I worked at, you will find that the PC's are far more heavily modified with crapware/bloatware than the macs were. Usually because having checkpoint/norton/whatever was an absolute requirement from a security perspective on the PC's but apparently the MAC's didn't even need disk encryption enabled much less virus scanners...
I'd argue that most issues people have with Windows PC fall in the category of 'self inflicted', but the point is, is that this is much harder to do on a Mac (apparently). I never heard someone building an image for a mac for example.
But no one here is patching kernels or blacklisting modules to fix hardware issues on Macs, or working around some Intel security technology that disables xhci controllers on Skylake if you aren't on Win10 because the last LCR didn't cull enough of the incompatible hardware to upgrade from Win7. Things like that are why our Mac group can support as many systems as the PC team with 1/5 the staff.
And that's not including Service, who deal almost exclusively with PC issues by volume.
This happens where I work. Amongst other things it:
1) Set the hostname of the machine. 2) At one point, changed the timezone to one of the US offices (I work in Europe). 3) Prohibited upgrades to newer versions of OS X until they were approved by the IT staff. 4) Forced reboots for installation of security updates (happened to everyone in the office at the same time, with a few minutes warning and no option to cancel).
and some other annoyances. I needed at one stage to reinstall OS X (my fault, as opposed to something wrong with OS X), and this got rid of the issue.
I was informed by a colleague that if you reinstalled OS X while connected to the corporate network, that it would install OS X from the company's IT servers instead of Apple's ones, thus pulling down the corporate image. I can't 100% verify that claim, but it sounds true what I have seen when people reformatted in the office.
Nothing has changed. Disregard everything you've heard about Windows 7 and Windows 10. It's just XP and a half inch deep slap of new paint.
Its late over here, and I could be misinterpreting this, but this feels like meaningless clickbait. 3 times cheaper to own is based on 117 * 3 ~= 543? Taking the extreme low end of one value and the extreme high end of the other feels dishonest.
Perhaps a more appropriate title would have been "In the long run, you'll probably save about $25/year by buying a Mac."
The minimum savings was $273/4 years = 68.25/year The maximum savings was $543/4 years = 135.75/year
"Despite a Mac costing anywhere from $117 to $454 more, it's cheaper than Windows."
The switching or the poorer screen of the air?
How I would describe a MacBook is "quality". It's not especially durable, it just doesn't break down over time. Other laptops break in stupid ways. The hinges snap because it's metal screwed into plastic. The cheap plastic casings wear down, discolor, and crack as you touch it. The trackpad wears down because it's plastic. The logic boards stress with the constant heat flux and end up breaking. Macs don't often suffer from that.
MacBooks aren't indestructible in any way. They're just built to a higher standard so they can withstand daily use. It's kind of sad that our bar is set so low, but many other laptops can't withstand daily use for years on end. Even Thinkpads, I've had the hinge areas crack because it's metal hinges screwed into a plastic chassis.
Oh no. Macbooks do suffer from this! Remember the NVIDIA lead-free-solder fiasco or the issue affecting a boatload of MBPs with Intel GPUs? At least they fixed my Fall 2011 MBP free of charge (logicboard swap). Getting my old Windows laptop fixed with the NV disaster was a whole other story.
I've definitely noticed the same thing. Almost every laptop (and computer, for that matter) has broken down within a year to a year and a half for some random dumb reason. Two of my laptops died due to messed up power supply connections on the motherboard, two others died due to the hinges completely snapping off, and another died because the hard drive failed - and that one was an aluminum iMac that I pawned off to my friend, who replaced the HDD and it works just fine still.
I've had my current MBP since 2012, and it's chugging along just fine - except for the hard drive, which I replaced with an SSD and have no problems with, and ironically enough the hinges, which totally cracked. I had to buy some replacement hinges off of iFixit, which I'm waiting on delivery for today.
Apple computers have by far been the longest lasting and least likely to crap out on me that I've ever had. I'm very happy with my old MBP, and the only reason I'm considering upgrading to a newer model is because I can tell this one might be on its way out in general.
The one thing stopping me is the price point... $1600+, yikes.
Consumer hardware is crap because the market doesn't want to pay for anything above crap. The laptops break after a year because that's how long the warranty is, and the manufacturer is counting on you to come back and buy next year's cheapest model when your laptop breaks.
Go look at enterprise quality PC laptops, they cost as much as a Mac does, but they last just as long.
I can tell you stories of ThinkPads which I have personally seen run over by cars, and while the LCD is broken and the body is a bit scuffed, they still work with an external monitor.
> The one thing stopping me is the price point... $1600+, yikes.
Yup, and if you buy mobile workstations, you're going to pay that much. The great thing about PCs though is that they don't retain their value like a Mac does.
This is why whenever someone asks me for a laptop recommendation, my first pick would be a 2-3 year old enterprise laptop. You can pick them up refurbished for around $300, and they'll easily last you another 3.
The only disadvantage is that companies are afraid to innovate their business laptop line, so in a lot of cases you're stuck with laptops that have a 1366x768 screen while everyone else is running around with a $2000+ extremely fragile ultrabook, which has a 3K display.
Amazingly, only the DVD drive was destroyed. Everything else continued to work.
I've taken my Macbook Pros to Burning Man (and used them while sitting having a drink on Esplanade reprogramming an LED display), and other camping events and have yet to kill one there. Surely at some point I will, but so far so good. But this is just my set of datapoints. My partner's older Macbook Pro just died for apparently no reason at all while using it at home last week, and she treats her much better than I treat mine. No manner of boot key pressing could get it to even bring up anything past the Apple logo.
Just because it would have killed a worse laptop doesn't mean the MacBook is especially durable. I'd say the durability of the MacBook is exactly what you should expect from a laptop, and others are just particularly bad.
Which is awful because basically the most durable mainstream laptop on the market meets my definition of "exactly average".
I agree, things should be a bit better. I'm hoping that some of the IP67 dust/water resistance from phones trickles over to laptops soon.
I'm still using a circa-2010 Thinkpad W-series (purchased refurbished in 2013). Needs a new cooling module (starting to overheat occasionally), and it's been through a couple battery packs and a keyboard replacement, but those are essentially wear items and it's otherwise still going strong.
So far I've actually stepped right flat on the screen once (it fell out of bed while I was in the bathroom and I couldn't see it under the covers) and I'm going to need to unlearn the habit of picking it up by the screen since other laptops aren't going to tolerate that. The T- and W-series are incredibly, incredibly durable pieces of hardware (note: the new Edge, Yoga, etc series are built much more lightly).
Previously I had a Fujitsu Lifebook T4220 convertible tablet from 2007. That was also very durable. It was built quite lightly but ironically the convertible screen would tend to pivot out of the way when you dropped it, which prevented damage, and since it was so light it tended not to pick up a lot of momentum. One day it just stopped powering up, probably some kind of electrical problem. Happened early 2013, so I got about 5 solid years of daily use from it. I have a broken T4200 I picked up for parts, I've been thinking about trying to troubleshoot it one of these days.
In contrast my fiance had a unibody MacBook Pro (Core2Duo I think, probably circa 2008?) in college and I wasn't nearly as impressed with the design there. The emphasis on passive cooling and having as few fans as possible tended to lead to overheating. What finally killed it was the screen cable going funky (I think). Could probably be replaced, but eh, I'm tired of repasting the damned CPU every 6 months when the overheating dries it out. She has a Thinkpad just like mine now.
On the downside, I got a consumer grade Lenovo, which meant free spyware and a less sturdy chassis than my MBP. Of course it was less than half the price of new similarly equipped Macbook Pro at the time.
I've disassembled more than a couple of laptops, cleaned out the continental-crust-thick wall of dust from the cooling fins, and replaced the thermal paste on the CPU.
See if you can find a disassembly guide for your machine and give it a go, it's fairly straight forward.
It had to be gone long enough that I ended up purchasing a new MBP (I'm a freelance dev and couldn't afford any down time), but it came back a-okay.
I dunno the whys and hows of getting them to do that kind of thing, but I'm still using the computer. Which is way better than the toshibas that I have owned over the years which last about 3-4 years as my daily drivers.
I imagine you got that fixed during the time the recall was active.
Thanks but no thanks, I'll stick to my trustworthy Fall 2011 MBP.
You're very lucky you don't have an early 2011 MBP. Infamously untrustworthy. If I had waited a few months to get your model or the 2012 model, I'd probably still be a Mac user.
I have one. Still works great.
-edit 13" models did not have this issue
A friend of mine who had two of the same model also had the same GPU overheating issues.
http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/mac/petition-demands-apple-fi...
Which would cost way more than $300 and presumably right before it failed it was working fine for them.
Also, a couple years ago updating to a specific version of OS X while LaTeX was installed caused the update process to freeze indefinitely, forcing you to reinstall everything. I had everything backed up, but it was a pain and could have easily caused me to lose important stuff if I was just a little bit lazier.
Still, everything runs smooth and great. Actually noticeably better than the 2015 hp ZBook I use for work.
Most of the "savings" for me over that period came in terms of reduced hassle and bother. OS X proved reliable and low-maintenance, minimizing the amount of time I had to spend playing IT man. And, unlike Windows, it didn't fuck up over time, even proving resilient to upgrades (I did every step from Leopard to Mavericks), so the regular reinstalls that I was used to doing weren't necessary. (And, unlike Windows, it had a decent backup tool supplied, so when I bought an SSD, which was the closest I got to needing to do a reinstall, I had to do little more than leaving it running overnight, unattended, once.)
Of course, things progress, and Windows vs OS X is moving closer to parity... thanks to efforts from both companies. But I replaced my soaked Macbook Pro with a new one anyway, on the basis of my experience - it certainly wasn't the sticker price, that's for sure - and it's working out OK for now.
I've opened up my MBA 2013. It's basically a large battery, smallish logic board, speakers and CPU fan.
I had the same experience with the 2011 model. About 6 months ago the motherboard went, computer is non functional. And yet...I have 13 year old Gateway laptop (first laptop I ever owned), and a 10 year old Dell that both still boot without a hitch. And that Gateway has some miles on it (bought it to play World of Warcraft).
But, as someone else here said, the "quality" difference between the Apple and PC products is immense.
>Previn says that while a Mac initially costs anywhere from $117 to $454 more than a similarly configured Windows PC,
TLDR; the study is hardly conclusive and knowing IBM is aligned with business goals.
[1]:https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/58j88j/ibm_claims...
"Yeah I was wondering about the Linux base. I was denied a Mac when they introduced this policy as I was what they call a privileged user (most sysadmins will be)."
Maybe if I was loaded I'd buy my folks and siblings macbooks, but I'm not, and I'm happy enough to fix the odd issue on their cheap windows laptops. one or two reinstalls a year while I watch some TV in the background beats convincing them to spend money they don't really have on top of the line hardware
but like I said, different story if you're making financial decisions for a big Corp
Even though there have been some questionable redesign approaches and a slight (perceived) slump in QC in recent years, Thinkpads IMO are still THE best machinery out there to just get stuff DONE.
They are reliable, full Linux compatibility, easy to service and have the best non mechanical / Notebook keyboard out there.
Tbh the only thing I envy the Macs for are their brilliant screens. But we have red nipples on our keyboards, so yeah...
Not to mention the possible selection bias since people chose a mac themselves and were not randomly sampled.
- Part of the reasons macs are cheaper is that they're massively less instrumented than PCs. - Most orgs have not migrated to Win10 because they're totally convinced they need that instrumentation on windows. - But they don't need that instrumentation on OSX, so it calls the entire premise into question.
It's also the case that people negotiate cheap block sales of SKUs from "trusted" partners to help pre-bundle all that instrumentation. But as this data shows, it turns out that buying less customized devices with better overall specs is actually a cost savings and per-unit cost.
Finally, I'd argue that employee satisfaction is almost directly a result of not having a heavy-handed and almost entirely arbitrary series of mandates forced onto their computer.
I won't talk about my employers efforts, but I know OTHER people (friends in IT) who are experimenting with mass deploys of Win10 and Surface books with a "let's throw EVERYTHING out and pretend these are a new platform" approach, and they tell me that they see benefits. As the conversations are casual, I cannot go further.
It's sort of amazing what happens to overall cost if you accept the premise that the vast majority of IT tooling and monitoring is in fact bad, wrongheaded, and not fulfilling real security and auditing requirements.
I'll be interested to see if the waves of BYOD and lightly managed systems give way to a return to centralisation again, when people realise what they don't have any more, or if it turns out, as you say, to be that they never really needed it in the first place.
Most IBMers with Macs were using their personally owned hardware (as was the rare IBMer using a Microsoft Surface). Early adopters (before the end of 2014) were supported internally through the community, and starting in 2015 we were required to install a configuration program that would add an IBM app store and configure the machine so it complied with the internal security rules. Many of the day-to-day headaches on the Windows machines (e.g., printing) were eliminated with the IBM development Mac tools, but other things were impossible or required a VM to do, like using an IBM internal SOCKS proxy application to connect to customer sites.
IBM has a very active and dedicated Linux community as well. I can't speak to support numbers, but the tooling was more mature and more tools were available on the RHEL distribution.
How are Chromebooks for people who have to deal with "family / friends" support issues?
Thousands of 2011 Macbook Pro owners had the same, now infamaous, problem, and Apple pretty much pretended the problem did not exist (until after my AppleCare expired and forced me to buy another laptop, which was not a Mac).
Sure, but I doubt it cancels out the other 10,000+ owners of defective early 2011 Macbook Pros.
http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/mac/petition-demands-apple-fi...
I'm citing a fairly well publicized incident that affected a significant number of Macbook owners - and these models were the top end 15" MBPs with quad core i7s with discrete GPU models - among the most expensive of Apple laptops, I might add - that Apple completely dropped the ball on. And this is coming from someone who recognizes that Apple historically has the best build quality and customer service.
There was a massive thread on the official Apple support forums on this problem that spanned a couple of years and a few hundred pages. Tens of thousands of posts without a single official peep from Apple. There were plenty of articles written about it on Mac sites and other tech sites like Ars Technica. It took Apple over a year to even acknowledge the issue. By the time Apple did issue the Repair Order (recall), a lot of people wrote off or sold their laptops at a loss and had no recourse.
So this is a little different from other laptop manufacturers having issues with a specific model. Before the Repair Order was issued, the official fix was to replace the logic board with a fresh logic board that had the same defect (most of the people who had their logic boards replaced got the same problem within a few months, including myself). Great if you had AppleCare, but a $500+ fix if the AppleCare had lapsed or if you didn't have AppleCare.
Am I bitter? Of course I am. I bought a relatively top end laptop from a company that had a reputation for treating their customers way better than their competitors. And I happily paid the premium (maybe 1K more than a similarly spec'ed Windows laptop at the time) with the expectation that I would be taken care of in the unlikely chance there was something wrong with my MBP. And that didn't happen. I was just lucky that I kept my bricked MBP around so that I could get it fixed when the recall finally came around. At least then I could get some salvage value out of it.
The only reason I keep the PC is because I still find macs to be suboptimal for gaming, and PCs to be easier to keep current by switching out the GPU or adding more storage or RAM. Given a mac with a more open-ended upgrade path, I would probably throw it out.
About a year ago my employer forced me to use a Windows machine. Fortunately, I have complete control of it (it's not managed by my employer); unfortunately, that doesn't matter. It's a complete cesspit: updates are horrible; the pre-installed crapware from the manufacturer is horrible; the pre-installed crapware from Microsoft is horrible; the interface is horrible (just trying to navigate around prompts and windows is … miserable). There is literally only one good thing I can say about Windows: the background and lock screen images are really, really nice (awesome, really; just beautiful).
In every other way using it has made my life measurably worse.
Meanwhile, I continue to use Linux on my personal machines. It Just Works™, and really well. It's reliable, fast, easy to use, pleasant to use: every time I log onto my personal Linux machine I breathe a sigh of relief.
Yes, some of that delta is due to greater familiarity with Linux, but a huge amount is due to this simple truth: the Linux interface is better than the modern Windows interface (which is, itself, worse than Windows 7 was). Linux feels like it was built by developers who use what they develop; Windows feels like it was built by a marketing department who use Macs.
You can have that in Linux too[1]. You can configure it to pull fresh images from your favourite sources, including Bing.
[1] https://vrty.org/ seems to be down at the moment
Perhaps, but that's just the best case situation. I know my way around Linux, and that's cheaper than Windows on the individual level, and far far far cheaper than Windows on the enterprise level. All it takes is users that know their way around Linux, right?
The real determinant though will be the cost averaged out over skill levels and prevalence of skill levels.
MacOS has one big thing going for it that Windows doesn't - there is only one desktop edition. None of that "Home" and "Pro" crap.
There are three levels of understanding of personal computers and how to manage them:
A) Basic understanding, the vast majority of users/clients B) Intermediate understanding, you often find yourself walking your relatives through setting up their mail client C) Expert understanding, you have deep knowledge of networking and user permissions for each computer on this network. You don't use apps to figure this out, you have set it up, tried it, and are proud of a system you have designed to make it all work.
I've found that many issues arise from folks working in IT whom are B that think they are C, and the frustration from not having Macs work identically as their Windows networking wizards causes friction. I think as people are getting better trained in BYOD, and the fact that there's no way around better IT training to accommodate it, is causing a sea change in adopting Macs.
Sadly, even today, using a PC laptop, the process is something like this:
1. Open lid and start work. Actually no, the battery managed to drain itself again due to the power-inefficiency of the system; better go find a cord and plug it in first.
2. Open lid again and start work. Actually no, the fancy “resuming Windows” animation has appeared. Check back after several minutes.
3. Try to start work. Actually no, Windows has required updates and needs to install and reboot.
4. Try to start work. Actually no, the previous update was apparently just the first; Windows has to reboot again and install something else.
5. Repeat step 4 about 3 more times.
6. Try to start work. Actually no, “something” in the background isn’t done screwing with the machine yet so everything I click on is unresponsive.
7. Try to click on something. Damn it, I forgot the built-in track pad is garbage and half the time I accidentally click on things I don’t want. Let me go find a mouse and plug it in.
8. Try to start work. Oh right, even the simplest applications take inexplicably 30 seconds to launch on a “modern” computer.
9. Begin work, probably an hour later.
This happens literally every couple of weeks but usually more often. Fortunately I only have the machine because I occasionally have to sync my development to compile with Visual Studio and so the entire system is mostly a distraction.
Meanwhile, on my main Mac machine, it’s virtually instantaneous to start working in all respects. Open the lid, the OS is READY and the apps are either already open or they restore nearly instantly. While the Mac can certainly have restart-worthy updates, it’s way smarter about this and I always retain FULL CONTROL over the process (including the “let the message sit there forever until my work is done” option). And that’s before I even start listing the Unix tools, the awesomeness of "brew", reasonable terminal emulation, etc.
Now what I am curious about is being able to do pushes that are corporate team just loves to do and ease of connection to to z, i, and p, systems. IBM recently moved 5250 emulation to a pure JAVA solution that works on Mac/Linux and I am sure z 3270 has its solution too. A lot of IBM system admin tools have been moved to JAVA just so it would be platform independent
I am constantly dumbfounded when I see "lean" startups shelling out for macbooks.
If you really want to save money and run a lean operation go linux.
in tears