How to persuade corporate IT into making your next computer upgrade an Apple | Hacker News Reader

How to persuade corporate IT into making your next computer upgrade an Apple

victusspiritus.com

1 pointmessel4 comments

"How to persuade corporate IT into making your next computer upgrade an Apple" - I don't see this question answered in the post...?

It was a bit mangled when I posted it earlier, and still needs some fine tuning, appreciate the feedback. WP repeated and cut out a section on Publishing, but here's the gist:

I highly doubt that one uniform operating system will dominate enterprise computer networks in the coming decade the way windows has done so historically. Linux and other unix variants (BSD) are ubiquitous for web development platforms. Mac OS X is the developer and design operating system of choice among many talented professionals. Often times windows support will come later (or never) compared to nix alternatives. A strong advantage of compiling source and scripting tools on Mac OS X, is that the transition from OS X to other unix systems is usually simpler than from Windows to any flavor of nix or vice versa (with cygwin/mingw).

This year I’m up for a replacement for my desktop system at work and after completing the conversion to Apple last year at home, I decided it would also server as the ideal setup at work as well. I transitioned my home desktop from Ubuntu 10.04 to Mac OS X Snow Leopard and really enjoy the polished interface, system stability, and ease of installations for development and practical home software (Homebrew helped). My recent experiences with Apple personal computers makes them far and away the best personal computers I’ve ever had the pleasure of using for a variety of applications (development, design, gaming, web browsing, and reading).

My experience of corporate IT is that "X is better than Y" is a long way down their list of priorities.

An IT department in a large organisation will typically customise the OS heavily, meaning that upgrading the OS (such as from XP to Vista or Win7) happens rarely, and switching platforms is unheard of (I've seen this once, when switching from Unix workstations to cheap NT4 boxes).

What I think is more likely is the use of Linux or OS X machines to remotely connect to Windows desktops or Windows virtual servers.

I'll keep that in mind for a decision this week. Worst case, I can keep on using the old xp box, and look for smaller or slightly looser organizations that don't mind me using a Mac for work.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com