IBMs 200K Macs have made the workforce happier and more productive | Hacker News Reader

IBMs 200K Macs have made the workforce happier and more productive

jamf.com

This is also written by an organization (Jamf) who creates the only popular product on the market for macOS deployment/configuration. There's likely a lot of number fudging and creative bias in there.

IBM faked numbers on behalf of a PHP software product?

And it's a terrible one, at that. I haven't had anything but negative experiences with any Mac infected with it.

IBM is not going to let them make claims w/o legal review.

Is this a selection bias?

1. Users prefer Macs

2. Users also have Macs at home

3. Users choose to switch at work.

This leaves number out employees on each platform. One place mentions 200,000, another 277,000 "Apple devices" the article starts with 290,000

It's not really clear to me what how the two compare at the conclusions are shown but done if the data is missing

Approximating from their total employee count (350,000) these do appear to be ~50/50.

If this is accurate, 80% of IBM is using a Mac or 50% (depending on your which number you use)

Is there another company using Macs at this rate (not Apple)?

Given this: I'm curious why users are more productive and how to replicate that success beyond "buy a Mac"

Older techs typically more win biased and IBM swings older. youts and some older devs wanted Macbooks, and fought a trench war. Built their own support system. Lenovo Tpads went to crap for a long while after the last IBM t6X, and replacement brands were even worse. So many of the older crowd gave in. There were guys dragging their duct-taped t60s until 2017 or so.

CFO/CTO saw the light and formalized the Apple lovefest.

Switching OSes can be a big game changer for happiness, especially if you are used to a particular OS.

Anecdote: I used to be a big Windows user, but after my partition table was destroyed and I had to start again, I decided to try out Linux - and never looked back. A few days ago I tried to help a friend get a program working on his Windows machine and it felt so locked down and limited. The process was something like:

1. Need to use Git to grab the program. No Git installed. Can't run `apt-get install git`, instead have to download a git bash and run some partial Linux environment.

2. `git clone` the program. Now discover I need to run some "anaconda" software to download a program to install a library that python needs to use.

3. Now I can run the software (not within the Anaconda prompt) and I need some additional file. The path name for the user has spaces in, so I think "I'll just create the file a the root C:\ to get this working". Nope, no administrator access (on their own machine!).

It sounds simple enough, but this is all literally a one liner in something like Debian: `apt-get install X; make; python X`. And every single Windows experience (for me) is like this. Couple that with the fact that most commands I need are now embedded in my brain, using Linux is a piece of cake, even for problems I've not come across before.

In your epic story Debian would fail at step 1, apt install X without administrator rights on the machine.

On the contrast, you can install most apps from Windows Store without admin rights.

Seems you used Debian long time ago, the equivalent of the Windos Store, Gnome Software assuming you are using the default install, doesn't ask for any password...

How does that work? Or does it only work for snaps?

I used Ubuntu 18.04 recently, it still asked.

Well it would be `sudo apt-get install X` and the password is my password. In Windows how do I write a file to C:\ without logging into the administrator account? I didn't know, my friend didn't know, what's happened?

The equivalent of sudo is right click / run as administrator. You can run a command-line shell like cmd or PowerShell, or a file manager this way, and it will allow you to write everywhere.

`start-process notepad -Verb runAs`

It's sort of mind blowing with these numbers that Apple doesn't intentionally target the enterprise.

Things like disk encryption key escrow, active-directory like controls, a single sign on solution, etc would effectively kill Windows in the enterprise.

My International Employer issues Macs. The disk encryption key escrow and single sign-on are indeed functional. The AD-like controls are really the last weak spot.

What software are they using for both of those?

Especially with the whole slowing iPhone sales thing. I just don't get it.

I wonder if IBM no longer having the in-house brand now that Lenovo was spun out makes it possible to even issue so many Macs. I'm also curious how much of a choice there was for the folks who got the Macs: was it a matter of "here's your IBM issued machine" or "Do you want a Lenovo, HP, Dell, or Mac?"

I'm also curious if a Linux-powered machine/laptop was an option.

> I'm also curious if a Linux-powered machine/laptop was an option.

Great question. In my experience of IT departments in companies whose business is not software, default issue is a windows laptop from a vendor which offered cheapest contract.

Red Hat is 12k employees. How would IBM not allow them to have linux laptops.

We get the choice between a couple different kinds of Lenovo laptop which come stock with a special build of RHEL, or a Macbook.

For the most part you have free reign to install whatever OS you want (usually Fedora, but sometimes CentOS, Debian, Ubuntu, Arch) as long as you get your work done and don't pester IT about supporting your non-standard configuration. I don't know how common this is outside of engineering, though.

Somewhat tangentially related, a Sass I worked at, most devs preferred MacBooks for their dev boxes (ruby on rails + Java). At the time, Windows 8.1 was out. Our target runtime env was Ubuntu. I preferred to do all my development in a linux VM. I was constantly finding bugs that were checked in because they assumed the other devs assumed that their Macs mirrors the deployment environment. Except, it didn't

Most common culprit was case sensitivity issues. APFS, by default, like NTFS, is case insensitive, unlike most common Linux filesystems. APFS can be made to be case sensitive, but it turns out, breaks a non insignificant number of Mac targetted apps.

Of course, this breaks when you have a case difference when deploying to Linux. E.g. cannot import a ruby module because of a case difference in a filename. In my experience, the belief they were running on a *nix meant my fellow devs thought they were immune to fuckups they associated with Windows, but they were wrong and abstinent/arrogant about issues when confronted about it, by me, because I was running Windows (although running our code in a linux VM). I hope thats not everyones experience, but that was my one experience with Mac users targeting Linux for deployment. Seriously had a hard time convincing them there were problems because "it works on my machine," to which of course I responded "deploy it and run the tests again."

To;Dr; MacBook != Linix laptop. Gets you maybe 95% of the way there. Still better off using a linux VM than relying upon same behavior between OS X and Linux. Besides, OS X is not even linux based. It's originally based on Net BSD (I have no idea how far the kernel, etc have deviated since).

They UNIX parts of Darwin was based is a derivative of 4.4BSD-Lite2 and FreeBSD.

Yes, meant to mention that OS X is largely BSD derived, and certainly not Linix derived. Though, I am under the impression that OS X was derived from NetBSD, not FreeBSD.

An aside, I ported NetBSD's strptime to (modern at the time) C++ in internal code at a previous employer, because we needed a cross platform DateTime parsing routine. (And strptime is not posix and not generally available to posix systems). To the best of my knowledge, there's still a bug in handling timezone offset parsing. Its been too long for me to remember exactly, but circa 2008, the man page definitely did not match the actual source behavior.

https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Da...

“The BSD portion of the OS X kernel is derived primarily from FreeBSD, a version of 4.4BSD that...”

https://wiki.freebsd.org/Myths

“The two operating systems do share a lot of code, for example most userland utilities and the C library on OS X are derived from FreeBSD versions.”

IIRC it was Thinkpad or Mac; I would expect each department to standardize on one platform instead of leaving it up to the employee though. Linux is fully supported in IBM.

I was a contractor for about a year working on IBM cloud. Only went to the office in Austin once but everyone had a MacBook Pro. They have this whole Mac@Home program you could use to manage all your software and VPN access. They talked about how IBM was one of the biggest users of Macs.

Only one guy on the team didn't use a Mac, another contractor and he was using a Linux laptop.

You could always do Linux on a PC but you were on your own. There are still deadenders trying that.

There’s always been at least windows alternative, am not sure if there’s a win-tablet

So random stream of thought here so sorry...

When I was at IBM I had a laptop running OS/2 (which has things I miss to this day). Current startup, all MacBook Pro (well 2 windows guys and a handful of Linux). Last startup all MacBook Pro. Startup before that which is now public with 1000s of employees, MacBook Pro starting back in 2007. IT requirement for all was turn on FileVault, give IT the key. Google Apps for everything, any other system like CRM is in the cloud (HubSpot, Salesforce, etc). Firewalls PFsense with OpenVPN. Switches for building / DC (our own at 2 places), UniFi for others. IT at least in this area is something that comes after you go public. You higher what is now called DevOps (was called good sysadmin when I started) for build and test infra when it gets to big for the original engineering team to deal with. Remember when you had a work cell?

Couldn't this really be just due to some kind of a Hawthorne effect?

When you don’t have to deal with malware and all sorts of scanners in the machine, it’s a sum greater than the whole type satisfaction.

IIRC IBM installs antivirus on their Macs.

McAfee or Norton?

Apple made Mac’a in enterprise and education near impossible to justify. Server app is crippled, imaging is now discouraged and works only with MDM profiles. Good luck imaging the entire OS, Catalina firmware upgrade make that impossible. Open directory hasn’t seen any love from Apple in many many years, we all use AD to manage logins. NetBoot has lost UI is further crippled with Sierra ... the list goes on and on.

I kind of want to shout: This is what we’ve been telling y’all for decades!!!!!

Wait until they all install Catalina...

I think this is a press release, not news (although many news outlet actually just copy-paste press releases), so it doesn't belong here...

I belongs insofar as your fellow hackers have upvoted it to be here

Is Gartner still use mac?

MacOS users are happier because ignorance is bliss

IBM is not shy about spending lots of money. They are a very good customer to have.

Actually back at the end of 90's the company I worked for at the time was doing some jobs for IBM. The amount of pressure IBM managers put on us trying to get away with paying as little money as possible was quite impressive. They wen as far as trying to get stuff done for free in exchange for promise to be able to use them as a reference.

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