Former Apple rival IBM could become the biggest buyer of MacBooks
economictimes.indiatimes.com
economictimes.indiatimes.com
The W530 and W520 weren't much better: they didn't have the terrible trackpads. IIRC the W520's graphics stack worked better, but that was three years ago. I helped an intern set up a W520 and it still had some issues before we got it stable. I wouldn't call myself a super expert Linux admin, but I do remember a day when I had to manually configure XFree86.
I came into IBM through acq. I'm a Mac guy these days, and was before the acq, where I'd used a HP machine with Linux when I first joined the company because there were no Macs to spare. When my pre-acq Mac couldn't run the Linux binaries I needed for work, I switched to a T420 and disliked it. I used R4x series in college and LOVED them.
I'm seeing more and more Macs around my office. We were probably 60% Thinkpads with Linux, 30% Mac, 10% Thinkpads with Windows going into 2015. I had been seeing Mac growth for a while, but it was all BYOD. Now that the deal went through, most folks up for a machine refresh are choosing Macs, mostly because that's what they own themselves. Some of the few die-hard Windows folks are even getting Macs and dual booting Windows.
Like others, I can't really comment on the purchase quantity, mostly because I'm not privvy to that information!
Oh, http://jobs.utah.gov/jsp/wi/utalmis/oijoborder.do;jsessionid...
* CanHazImage * Pupet * Crankd * PlanB * Munki Required *
https://github.com/google/macops
https://www.usenix.org/conference/lisa13/managing-macs-googl...
* Disclaimer - I work for IBM, but not in IT or on endpoint management solutions. I am not in a position to confirm or deny the possibility IBM might be buying hundreds of thousands of Macs. My work laptop is a Thinkpad.
IBM makes a front end to this MDM protocol, so they can probably use that. Or Profile Manager, which Apple includes with OS X server. See Air-watch.com for an example of what the MDM protocol allows.
The largest Enterprise they had was only 25,000 Macbook a year. And IBM is 10 times the size of that order.
Most of the Enterprise I know, big or small are still very much Window based. The way Mac are getting in right now are through BYOD. However, most CIO see this as additional burden with Apple devices, and therefore most planning are still based on the Windows world.
CRM, ERP etc.. lots of business class things still are not available on Mac. Although there are alternatives, no business wants to try.
Hopefully IBM and Apple could use this chance to smooth out the quirks rolling Apple devices in Enterprise. And more company to follow.
Dont get me wrong, this isn't about getting rid of Windows. I am sure there are lots of people who enjoy Window 10. But when our company tries to switch over to Mac, we have had very little support and real world cases to based on.
P.S - Most of you working in the I.T / Computer Industry would have no problem doing so, but there are lots of industry out there who cant risk to switch even if they wanted to.
But they also have Notes etc for Mac OS now, so no need to shy away from it.
Windows runs well in Parallels, but fortunately when you run Parallels you're also running either generic drivers or drivers developed by the Parallels team. Thus the experience is solid.
When you run Windows using Bootcamp you're forced to run Apple's own drivers to power a lot of things. But Apple has left their drivers buggy, unoptimized, and just bad. I think Windows has shown that with good driver support you CAN get solid battery life, but on a Macbook/Pro/Air you get terrible battery life because Apple doesn't support their own hardware going into lower power states.
I've tried to run Windows in Bootcamp, I honestly wonder if the people who constantly tell others to do so actually ever have themselves? The experience was most unpleasant, even graphics switching wasn't supported, the touchpad broke every few weeks, it ate through battery life, got extremely hot, and Apple's updates to the Bootcamp drivers took months.
I'd happily recommend running OS X and Parallels w/Windows. I'd still warn caution if your productivity relies on Bootcamp working and working well.
Except AMD doesn't ship the drivers for it, Apple does. So I have to wait for Apple to ship Win10 compatible drivers for AMD's card, and who knows how long that'll take. Meanwhile this is my primary gaming box (yes, it actually is quite a nice machine GPU-wise) so I guess I can say goodbye to PC gaming until Apple is gracious enough to provide me with an updated driver. (The last driver they shipped was in December 2014, it's been total silence since then. Who knows if they'll ever update it? Maybe El Capitan will have new drivers as part of an updated Boot Camp Assistant? Do they even care?)
Also, if you have system administrators for OS X machines who need a point-and-click interface for everything, you need to take another look at your hiring practices.
Edit: oh and for the initial imaging you need to use NetInstall and System Image Utility, but they're not separate products still.
I would imagine even the new mac pro's can even be rack mounted if necessary.
Are these considered problems or solutions? AD solved problems for the last company I was at, but only for the minority of machines running Windows.
Remember the costs: Not only buying new computers but buying some/many new user applications, retraining users on the OS and applications; rebuilding systems that integrated with the old platform and apps; replacing or rebuilding IT management systems that manage testing, deployment, configuration, patching, and support of thousands (or more) of computers and users; retraining or replacing much of your IT staff; testing and deploying all these things (with newly trained staff using new tools); and all the costly downtime that results from the inevitable bugs of new systems, greatly compounded by deploying all these new systems together: e.g., Why can't they print? The new OS? The new printer driver? The new printer config? The new application? The new user errors?
What does the business gain? Instead of clicking an icon on the Windows desktop, the employees click one on the Mac desktop. Then their application or browser opens and they do the same thing they did last week (except for having to be retrained to do the same task in a new way).
The popular thing to do right now is for businesses to move away from platform locked software completely. So instead of it being a "Windows Vs. Mac Vs. Linux" battle, all internal software is on the web and the desktop only runs Office/browser/email client, etc.
Now, sure, there is some software that cannot be run in a browser. But that list of software shrinks more and more as additional browser functionality is added and libraries make it easier to do complex things.
So the question is: How does this expensive Mac migration pay for itself in the short, medium to long term? And are there other avenues, like web-migration, which could have saved more?
That's a tall order given IBM 's existing software infrastructure, Apple's migration tooling and support staff for enterprise, and the constraints that accounting standards place on the way equal cost would have to be figured.
Calculating the charge against goodwill associated with getting 200,000 people to give up their ThinkPad keyboards is left as an exercise for the reader.
The tech folks usually get a Mac Pro or a high-spec'd Dell (it has better specs than any Mac Laptop that's available at the moment, but is about the size and weight of a TV tray). The business guys and PMs go for the Airs and Surfaces...I'd say the Surfaces are about 2:1 to the Airs on takeup, and that's mostly because of the form factor and pen.
There's been a couple rough spots, but our leadership simply decided it was time to figure it out, and if we did, we'd be years ahead of larger enterprises, thus giving us a competitive advantage.
In terms of Office, the bigger problem has been legacy Access databases. We solve this by setting up some VMs with RDP access for the Mac users. But there's also a couple Mac utilities that let you export Access tables to CSV which can then be loaded up into something sane.
A surprising number of people also use Project, Visio and OneNote and there's not really a good portable solution for those cases. I've been pushing people to use yED for portable charting (instead of Visio), OneNote is now available for Office 365, and people are finding Excel a good enough Gantt chart tool for many purposes.
Office on Mac is quite good compared to Windows, just not all of the products people expect to use are available.
The bigger picture thing is that this is going to happen and enterprises need to figure it out. Non-cross-platform applications and processes need to be abandoned. This also happens in reverse with remote Linux servers being easier to work with on Macs than via Windows (putty and winSCP sort most of the issues out, but they aren't perfect).
In my experience people really don't care about the desktop experience too much, IMHO Windows is better than OS X for most of that anyways, but they care about "getting shit done" and that means apps, and these days web-based apps. The OS just isn't that big of a factor so long as the things people need to GSD is available. They're choosing hardware and form-factor over OS and they pick the one they think will work best for them.
Having struggled with OSX an apples obvious abandoning of any professional us other than a one man band designer - I hate apple hardware with a vengeance.
Submission Guidelines Refresher:
In Submissions
Please don't do things to make titles stand out, like using uppercase or exclamation points, or adding a parenthetical remark saying how great an article is. It's implicit in submitting something that you think it's important....Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait.
Some of the Lenovos are pretty robust, too; I don't know much about the low-end models, but some of the upper-ends are quite nice. If they had first-class Linux support I'd even consider getting one.
If a system is not certified then you are relying on Linux developers making it work - they may do so, but are often hindered by drivers or small tweaks to hardware. As importantly, making a whole system work is fully is considerably different to making a specific component work.
Personally I couldn't be more happier with my X230 and many co-workers use the X1 Carbon.
So technically I can't see a reason to do this. The X1 Carbon is essentially an ultrabook close to the new macbooks in most of its features.
Not to mention that IBM insists that we use DB2 and run on their flavor of server-side Linux, where the IBM products that we integrate with have different long-standing bugs than on the Windows versions all our other customers use.
Wasn't that way in Perth a couple of years back, it was all Lenovo, except management were moving over to Mac as their refresh cycle came through.
mb, mb air, the small mbp are all excellent office machines.
switched personnally to a mba in 2012, wouldn't go back to a wintel notebook if they paid me.
Didn't the Mac version of Office get canceled then restarted then canceled then restarted a number of times over the years?
Seriously. It's been downhill since Vista. Every upgrade since XP has been disruptive, and destroyed time-saving behaviors.
I can't imagine the mind of the person at MS who decided that making Solitaire pay-to-play was a good idea.
It's fascinating how decisions like this get made, how products like Win 8 and 10 get out the door, and how MS seems to think it can fix the terrible design by downvoting critics on public forums and getting PR companies to write booster posts that are so ham-handed they have no persuasive power.
As a company, MS has a lot of really smart individuals doing really dumb things collectively. I'd be incredibly interested if MS could find its own Rodney Brooks to explain the business processes that make that happen.
Not a hater, btw. Office 365 and Azure both have their good points. But Windows and mobile seem like industry-changing disasters now, and from the outside it seems like the icebergs shouldn't have been that hard to miss.
To me, this goes far deeper than the surface of "charging for solitaire". There has to be some systemic dysfunction within the windows team.
Or to have to suffer through ads in a program that was once free and continues to be free online, because the OS was given away?
Neither of those seem fair to me.
People are mainly noticing now because its one of the default apps again.
It categorically is not.
All of the functionality in classic solitaire (the version since Windows 95) is all free. There are also additional game modes which are also free.
But they've added "daily challenges" which you can pay to play. It is an optional additional part of the game.
> how products like Win 8 and 10 get out the door
You mean products people dislike because Microsoft has actually tried to push forward their platform? Seems like they cannot win. If they push out a product exactly like XP over and over people will complain that Microsoft is being lazy/playing it safe/not innovating, but if they push out a product like 8/10 then people complain that they are changing too much.
Reminds me a lot of Ubuntu Unity. Everyone complained that they wanted innovation in the Linux desktop space, and when Ubuntu tries to provide that everyone freaks out because "they changed classic Linux!!!" Well which is it? Do you want to see progress or don't you?
> MS seems to think it can fix the terrible design by downvoting critics on public forums and getting PR companies to write booster posts
Now we're moving into the realm of conspiracy theory. Did it ever occur to you that other people have a different opinion to you and that that is ok? Not everyone is a Microsoft shill, and your opinion isn't the only legitimate one.
Canonical didn't make Unity to innovate for the user as much as they did to have a unified interface that could run more easily on phones and tablets operating on the same concept as Windows 10. Whether people want that, time will tell though it was innovative thinking even though Unity is still a bad experience for experienced users, we can't even right click a Launcher icon and edit its properties. That's pretty stupid.
Sorry, but simplifying and clarifying the interface for users absolutely is a goal for unity: "innovation for the user". All the user-testing showed that general users (ie non-developers-or-techies) found many aspects of the Linux user-experience too complex. So a lot of time was spent simplifying all sorts of aspects of Ubuntu so that it could be used by more general users. I know because I saw user-interface report after report. Furthermore, having a single user-experience across your different classes is trying to be user-centric. It's true that since there were three code-bases 'unifying' to one base was a key goal at an engineering level.
That doesn't deny your point that Unity is less suited to users who prefer the traditional Linux window manager experience e.g focus-follow-mouse.
On the article:
If this pans out it could spell the end of Thinkpads as high quality laptops that deliver premium performance while being very robust and sturdy. Who is left in that niche? Are we left with only either apple laptops, or shoddy plastic jobs that need to be kept in bubble wrap at all times?
My hopes for great new laptops lie with some brand new crowdfunding efforts, fantastic as it may sound. Also, it would be a pity if Thinkpads would dies now, as they have just implemented dual batteries with hot swap in last two generations; IMO this is long overdue, but I haven't heard of a laptop manufacturer that did it.
I think that boat sailed a while ago. I'm writing this on one and it's the worst machine I've owned to date quality wise. Keys that spontaneously dis-integrate, wwan card that bricks itself (and replacements are not accepted by the BIOS because they're not 'authorized') and so on. Last laptop of this brand for me.
Maybe Asus or Acer has something half decent?
It's super light, but the feel and build quality is still there.
Have you taken a look at other laptops? If so, which one will you go with next time? I'm a Linux user, so if Thinkpads are as bad as some people say they are nowadays, I might even get a MBP and install Linux on it.
The laptop looks sleek, but build quality is very flimsy with issues like paint-peeling, scratches, and malfunctioning hinges causing display to flicker/black-out. Also Acer support sucks and traveller's warranty is not international warranty.
Beware of cheap thinner laptops. They may look nice in the store but poor construction and cheap materials will come to bite you later. IMO Budget laptops have regressed in this matter compared to older bulkier models (including Dell Inspirons and XPSes in my experience).
Can't speak for more expensive models though.
Every generation of thinkpad in the past decade plus seems to've been decried as terrible by at least some people whose opinion I respect, and then I've bought another one and it's worked fine.
I have a feeling that while there may also be some degree of decline, a lot of this is that when a thinkpad's good, it's sufficiently good that when we have trouble with one we judge it far more harshly than normal.
I still have an elderly iMac here that hasn't been powered up for a long time (the graphic card overheats easily so I have to run the fans at full power, design error on that particular model) so I know OS/X but it just does not compare for me to linux in terms of how easy it is to run it on anything and everything. What also helped deciding this is that I'm running a very close copy of what is on my production machines on my development machine so I can transfer stuff from the one to the other and expect it to work right away.
Then of course there's the Eurocom Panther 5SE: Xeon E5-2600 v2 series processors and 32GB of DDR3 1600MHz RAM. Weighs 12lbs :)
Eventually I think the low-power server movement could end up yielding more high end laptops... hopefully some that are lighter than 5kg!
Dell Precision line is still kicking, beastly machines, there is no better (IMO of course ;-)).
They won't win any design awards and are a bit on the hefty side, but performance-wise hard to beat. Have 32GB RAM in mine, can have several VMs running, and do development work (compile to ram disk instead of thrashing SSD) on host OS (Fedora) with memory to spare.
Dual fans are also a nice-to-have with heat-generating i7 processor. Maybe not a huge deal for some but the BIOS is pretty ridiculous in terms of configurability/locking down the machine.
Sure, when I use it that is. It lives on a laptop stand alongside connected monitors (which, btw, is another bonus, 5 displays if you like ;-)). Use a compact Cherry mechanical keyboard for day-to-day, only touch laptop keyboard when traveling.
Edit: The M4800 doesn't come with 32GB of RAM either - which one do you have?
M4700, would be surprised (and disappointed) if they neutured the M4800 down to 16GB.
Thanks for the System76 ref, looks like Alienware style, 7.4 lbs. on the 15", a tank in disguise ;-) Impressive that they're running desktop CPU in there, must be really loud fan-wise -- do you own one?
Alienware seemed focused on LAN party gaming even before Dell bought them - not interested :)
And the submission title is "IBM to Purchase 200000 Macs Annually with 75% of Empl. Switching from Lenovo"
That's editing, not editorializing. There's no opinion inserted. Instead vague terms like "big" are replaces with concrete numbers, making the title almost as useful as the entire article. The guidelines are against edits, but they also seem to be against flashy vague terms, and a change like this is useful.
It says that 50-75% of employees could switch, and that IBM could purchase up to that many Macs.
It completely misrepresents the article.
Anecdotally, and based on a limited sample size, I've had great experiences with HP's corporate laptop (and other) product lines - not the consumer lines. They seem to last forever, much longer than Dells and than users, who like new equipment, would like them to. I have one that's around ten years old that runs fine, except for the pointstick. I can't remember the last one that suffered hardware failure.
Their Elite laptop line has excellent support and excellent design. Sitting next to me is an EliteBook; I can pop off the bottom cover and service it as easily as a desktop. It's pretty cool.