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Comment by jwildeboer | Hacker News Reader

So on the one side we have the Buy Your Own Device* (BYOD) trend and on the other side we have stuff bought with public funds. Guess what - people will bring their own Macs, iPads etc and thus are exempted from the EPEAT rule - and the city saves money. Win-win? Well, except for the environment, but hey ...

(*) I refuse to call it Bring your own device. This trend really is about moving investments from the company to the work force. It's effectively workers paying fro their job - and that is so wrong ...

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The purchase price of the device (investment/capital expenditure) is not neccessarily the greatest expense. Sure, in many smaller companies it will be, but in companies that have (for example) information protection policies or systems/services beyond email, support and operating costs for BYOD can in fact be more expensive.

Consider the simple scenario of using GMail, calendar and contacts - on a MacBook you need to know to configure it as an Exchange service, or you only end up with mail. Many may want to enforce some sort of policy on the device - such as requiring a PIN to unlock.

Spread that across all the device types users might bring in and compare that with managing just a single device, for example BlackBerry.

Sure, there are tools these days that make it easier to manage. Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8, for example, can be managed using SCCM. But in many cases BYOD does't deliver the (often naive) expectations of savings.

> Consider the simple scenario of using GMail, calendar and contacts - on a MacBook you need to know to configure it as an Exchange service, or you only end up with mail.

Actually, you can't set up Google anything with Exchange on a MacBook. For whatever reason, Google Sync only accepts connections from mobile devices. I'm not sure if the ActiveSync protocol is substantively different for mobile vs desktop, or if Google is looking at user agent strings, or what, but you can verify it for yourself pretty easily.

The only way to get calendar and contacts on OS X 10.7+ is to set it up as a GMail account, which magically does the right thing.

There's a long history of other professions providing their own equipment: barbers buy their own scissors, chefs buy their own knives and builders/plumbers/electricians are often required to buy some equipment themselves.

I'm not saying I agree with it, particularly when working for big corporations, but it's not unprecedented.

None of those are "profesions" in the strict sense of the word

Dont forget that many builders/plumbers/electricians are not employees but contractors.

And Hairdressing (at least in the UK) has some bysantine working practices that only exist in that industry

Doctors buy their own stethoscopes.

Again Doctors are a special case

They are all self employed in the UK. They have a day job in the NHS and have private practice.

Very few scissors store company-confidential data.

What some companies do (for example, mine) is give employees a stipend for the amount a traditional corporate Lenovo would cost. The employees then make the choice of what machine they want to buy with this money. If it's more, the employee pays it out of pocket. If its less, the extra is supposed to be returned to the company. I don't have any numbers on how many companies with BYOD do this, but I know mine is not the only one.

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