Corporate Mac Sales Surge 66% 494
syngularyx writes "Mac sales in the enterprise during Apple's last fiscal quarter grew a whopping 66 percent, significantly outpacing the rest of the PC market, which grew just 4.5 percent in the enterprise. The data from Apple's previous fiscal quarter was highlighted on Friday by analyst Charlie Wolf with Needham & Company. He said though he originally viewed success in the enterprise as a "one-quarter blip," it now appears to be a "durable platform" for Apple."
What makes this especially interesting is that Apple apparently isn't looking for corporate sales, and considers them "collateral success" rather than an indication that they should market specifically to corporate buyers.
Re:Figures (Score:4, Informative)
Looking at it again, maybe they mean 66% in the last *year* as those numbers look more plausible at ~540,000 for Q1 2010.
Re:Bring-your-own platform (Score:3, Informative)
I work in IT at a large private university. The official gospel is that 'we are a WinDell campus', but the students all buy Macs, and my group actually all use Macs for most tasks, except where there's some stupid reason we have to use Windows. So IT here have slowly moved toward full Mac support, and it'll happen elsewhere, as the pressure to support them increases. Think about shops in the early 90's that were all Sun or SGI, and as the cost and convenience factors ushered in the great tragedy of 'Windows is Enterprise', IT departments were dragged with much cursing and gnashing of teeth to support Windows.
Re:Figures (Score:3, Informative)
That's how financial people do it, they compare last quarter to the same quarter the year previous. That way you don't get terrible reductions after the holiday quarters.
Re:Corporate sales? (Score:5, Informative)
The 27" iMac is pretty hard to beat. Consider that a 27" IPS 2560x1440 screen is about $1000 to start with (hell, dell's more expensive than apple on this one), that gets you a small, quiet, mid range i5 system with a real graphics card for $700... It's not unbeatable, but it's a reasonable price.
Re:Mandatory ACLs (Score:5, Informative)
Is that a troll question, as in rhetorically expecting an answer in the negative?
Mac OS X has ACL built in:
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=2005050120073947 [macworld.com]
-dZ.
Re:Corporate sales? (Score:3, Informative)
"Talk about wasting money."
If you spec out a similar HP or Dell (esp. at corporate pricing), you often pay around the same amount - sometimes more. Seriously, look around sometime and try it. A lot of it depends on where in Apple's refresh cycle you are when you make the purchase, and a lot of it depends on how close to the end of the fiscal quarter HP and Dell are, but generally the prices are close once you start matching spec for spec.
( While I'm pretty sure that some bargain hunter will come up with something that is cheaper if they look hard enough, the general rule applies, and since most businesses don't have the time or expertise to go do the tech equivalent of extreme couponing, it definitely applies here. )
The perception of expense comes with folks being used to seeing the cheap low-end consumer-grade stuff that {$OEM} pukes out in volume. Since Apple doesn't bother with that market, they get the perception of being too expensive.
...plus you need the Windows 7 Licenses.
Those are going to be dirt cheap compared to the seat licenses of Visual Studio that the guy coughed up for - after all, we're talking about a business here.
Re:Collateral success vs indication of support nee (Score:5, Informative)
For what you pay Apple for a three year support contract which requires you to send the machine in or bring it in, you get onsite service for the same period from pretty much any other vendor. I live on a one-lane road in the back of beyond and HP sent a technician to work on my laptop even though I'm three hours away from the place from which they sent him. Of course, he did actually manage to break the laptop further, but Apple is capable of doing the same thing and I should probably thank him because I ended up getting a better one as a replacement.
Re:Collateral success vs indication of support nee (Score:5, Informative)
Which is why this is such a big story. Apple made a jump like this while having sub-par service and expending absolutely ZERO effort at marketing to corporations. They even quit making the XServe and XServe RAID. So why the jump in sales?
Makes sense. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Mandatory ACLs (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Corporate sales? (Score:2, Informative)
these aren't in any way comparable to a machined lump of aluminium with the ventilation holes hidden in the screen hinge.
Because of this very design decision (as few vents as possible and hide the ones we're forced to have), I find some Macbook Pros to be uncomfortable to use on my lap because they get so hot [pcauthority.com.au].
Also, while you deride plastic casing, I find Macbook Pros to be exceedingly fragile; one wrong bump and the pristine aluminum casing in marred. Dell Latitudes and HP Elitebooks (Dell's and HP's business-class laptops) are very well made and can take a lot of abuse.
Re:Corporate sales? (Score:5, Informative)
No, the reason that they're doing it this way, according to most educated guesses, is that SMART status while standard is a little unreliable sometimes, and you really don't want to be polling it all the time, and in the prior iMac (2009-2010) they used a specific special cable that was different for each manufacturer's drive (and they use about 4 different makes in the iMac line - including Seagate - they don't claim to know more than them, they simply ask Seagate and others for a drive that has specifications they can use, in this case a custom firmware that makes the drive more useful to them).
What they then did was repurpose the LED access light connector, which they don't use (there's no external LED HD light on the iMac) and used the signals for temperature sensing. What this means is that they can simply use one connector (the same connector) regardless of what drive they install, streamlining inventory and assembly. Since it was never designed for user service, they didn't see it as a downside that it was a non-standard method.
Now, having personally upgraded the HD in my own 20" white Intel iMac, I wish they'd made it possible for me to do without jumping through hoops if I upgrade to one of these machines (my white iMac simply has a temperature sensor that attaches to the outside of the drive, so you just transfer it to the new one), but I'm sure it won't be long before some third party solution comes along to cure it. Apple's own documentation mentions shorting that line out if an SSD is installed in that bay instead of a spinning drive, for example, and I'm sure they are looking at what some third party shops are doing - they released firmware for the 2011 iMacs that enabled full 6GBs speed on 2 of the 3 SATA busses, for example, despite not shipping any BTO parts that could use it, ostensibly after OWC said "hey, it would be cool to put our SATA 3 SSDs in here!"
The iMac is a big laptop, essentially, so I expect it to come with various issues like this. It's no different from a custom logic board and PSU. It will be documented and worked out soon - likely using Apple's own documentation.
If they're so determined to force the upsell, you think they'd have stuck to having the CPU soldered onto the board though, eh? As it is now, this is one of the first times in the iMac they've gone for a socketed stock CPU. I'm not sure anyone has attempted to put in anything different, but no doubt it will be tried soon. The GPU is also on an external card that is clearly a board made by AMD. It's obviously custom and thus not upgradable easily, but the door does remain open for the possibility of changing it out in the future - even if it's only for one of the more powerful cards currently in the lineup (like the one in the top spec 27"),
Re:Corporate sales? (Score:4, Informative)
But you can upgrade the RAM aftermarket - easily in fact, and it's user serviceable. They take temperature data because the iMac is cooled by zones, rather than simply monitoring the CPU temperature. There are sensors all over it. Their old method (custom cable) required a separate part, as did the even older method (a physical temperature probe (the most user friendly method). This new method removes the need for both of those things, and you can bypass it by shorting the cable out, in the same manner to jumper settings, so presumably other in-zone sensors are fine, although an internal reading is obviously more accurate and allows finder control of the fans.
You are quick to mark it as an "anti consumer conspiracy" when the far more obvious choices are "it was designed that way because it worked for them.