The Mac In the Gray Flannel Suit 392
oDDmON oUT points us to a BusinessWeek story about the increasing use of Apple products in the corporate sector. Many companies are finding that their employees are pushing for the transition more than Apple itself. Quoting:
"While thousands of other companies scratch and claw for the tiniest sliver of the corporate computing market, Apple treats this vast market with utter indifference. After a series of failed offensives by the company in the 1980s and 1990s, Chief Executive Steve Jobs decided to focus squarely on consumers and education customers when he returned to Apple in 1997. As a result, the company doesn't have ranks of corporate salespeople or armies of repairmen waiting to respond every time a hard drive fails. He believes it's difficult for any company, including his, to be effective at satisfying both corporate buyers and consumers."
Repairing em' (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Repairing em' (Score:5, Informative)
I can't imagine what it would be like
I'm sorry you have no imagination. Here's some help:
My wife's shiny white plastic iMac (3 years old) died on Thanksgiving. I took it to the nearest Apple store the next day, the busiest shopping day of the year. They replaced the power supply for free. I was in the store for half an hour.
I now have a mac, too.
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Otherwise you have to wait one whole day for the parts to come in.
Shouldn't be expensive (Score:5, Insightful)
Every company I was in (and that ranges from the very small to humongous worldwide behemoths) had a couple spares at the department level.
And you surely wouldn't store your critical data on one desktop?
Re:Repairing em' (Score:5, Insightful)
Blackberrys, OTOH, just get wiped and returned to RIM. I would think you would do that with a Mac, too. I wouldn't even know how to open one up, and if I did manage to get it open I'd feel the same way I feel when I look under the hood of any modern vehicle. Where's the damn carburetor?
So I guess the question for me would be does Mac offer a next day replacement service, and what does it cost? We'll leave aside for now what to do about the proprietary, Windows only software that our customer base compels us to use.
Re:Repairing em' (Score:5, Funny)
On a Mac it's right between the flux capacitor and the dilithium crystal matrix.
Re:Repairing em' (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Repairing em' (Score:5, Insightful)
Where I work, we have a web page we can log into (Warranty Parts Direct), type in the ST, put in a description of what is wrong, any Dell Diag codes you might have, what you did to troubleshoot, select the part you want replaced, and submit. There's even a spot to select whether we want on-site support or not, though since they sub-contract that to a company in St. Joseph, MO, it's almost never next day. We only use this option for mainboard replacements in laptops. Everything else, we do ourselves, because it's quicker.
There is an online chat function so you can talk with one of the techs, plus there is an 800 number to call. I've never spent more than about 5 minutes on the phone with them (I rarely ever have to call in the first place).
I can tell them exactly what the issue is right away, and they'll still make me go through all the tests to prove that what I'm telling them is in fact the problem. We have 4 hour service from them, yet, that 4 hours doesn't count until after they acknowledge what the problem is, it's not 4 hours from when you say you have a problem.
Also, for servers that we have next day service on, they also like to make you wait on the phone just past their shipping deadline for the day, so that you don't actually get the parts until two days later.
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At current PC prices, you'd be nuts not to have at least one or two (more if you're a large business).
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Re:Repairing em' (Score:5, Funny)
You went to the Apple store and had it fixed? This is why Slashdot is no fun any more.
Where's the story about using a Dremel, an old VCR, a soldering iron, and a Perl script to fix it yourself?
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"Oh wait lemme just take it to the Apple Store and have them fix it."
Yeah, not gonna happen.
Re:Repairing em' (Score:5, Funny)
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iMacGyver?
I suppose if anyone has enough sway to bring the mullet back into style, it'd be Apple...
Re:Repairing em' (Score:4, Funny)
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Two weeks later my Macbook Pro died (sti
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I can't imagine what it would be like I'm sorry you have no imagination. Here's some help: My wife's shiny white plastic iMac (3 years old) died on Thanksgiving. I took it to the nearest Apple store the next day, the busiest shopping day of the year. They replaced the power supply for free. I was in the store for half an hour. I now have a mac, too.
Yes, carrying a Mac in one at a time to a repair store in a corporate environment of 1000+ users is extraordinarily obvious! How could I have been so blind!
Re:Repairing em' (Score:5, Insightful)
(that's 21 screws, five cables, two suction cups, and 15 minutes to get past)
And care to imagine how difficult it can be to keep from getting a spec of lint between that glass and LCD panel when servicing it?
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I don't see the problem with fixing it yourself. The parts are easily available from iFixit and the time it took wasn't that far above what I expected for a complete tear down and build up of a laptop.
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Re:Repairing em' (Score:5, Funny)
1. Throw away defunct Mac
2. Buy new Mac
3. Profit!!!
Re:Repairing em' (Score:5, Interesting)
Apple's warranty service is execrable. We had one machine sit there broken waiting on a new motherboard for 6 months.
The replacement motherboard gave out last month (the extended warranty expired last year), and we had to take it down to the Apple store, because we can't just buy a replacement part like we could for a PC.
Macs are just fine for personal use, but Windows is far better in a lab environment. It's easier to administrate, reasonably easy to keep secure, and very easy to buy hardware and software for.
Re:Repairing em' (Score:4, Interesting)
Server is not quite there yet.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Sure the Apple stuff is integrated and works for the basic case. However, if you try to move past what is written in the sparse user manual, you not only lose support for your basic "AppleCare" but also have to spend time figuring out how Apple has mangled the pieces of the open source offerings that hold their stuff together.
That all being said, I think with some work and polish the server side of things could really become a viable solution. It's just not quite there yet. This is coming from someone who administers these things for a living...
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Re:Why not just use BSD then? (Score:5, Informative)
It's fine to say, stick with BSD or Linux, but they only ship with pieces of the puzzle, not integrated at all. This is especially apparent in the Directory Services area. Sad to say but nothing except Apple's offering comes close to competing with ActiveDirectory. OpenLDAP itself is great (and we use it to serve up information on thousands of users), but it's just one piece. Then you have Kerberos, Samba (with its own password schemes), SASL Authd, Radius, etc. With BSD and OpenLDAP, Kerberos, and Samba, you can get it working pretty well but you still have to deal with changing passwords in two or more places, different password expiry schemes that all have to be kludged together sometimes with spit and baling wire.
Apple's solution, on paper, is more ideal. Directory Services exports both an authentication layer and an authorization layer, welded together in a common API and common admining tools. Change the user's password and the password server, which integrates SASL, Kerberos, NTPassword, and LMPassword hashes, everything, no matter what protocol, keeps everything in sync. There are no passwords stored in LDAP at all, which is as it should be. Samba, PAM, SASL clients, etc, all talk to the password server. Contrast this with most LDAP installations on nix. There's a userPassword field, which can have any number of hash types in it. Then there's the shadowAccount attributes for password expiry. Then there's sambaNtPassword, and SambaLMPassword fields with their own hashes. Then there's Kerberos off to the side, never really integrated (except for certain kinds of SASL binds). It's honestly a mess. I hope that in the future, other products like Fedora Directory will take care of many of these problems. Samba 4 certainly will be a huge leap forward. One which I hope (with it's integrated LDAP system) will finally compete with ActiveDirectory.
In short, what Apple has done with OS X Server is a tantalizing idea of what we could do in the *nix server space if we put our minds to it. Sadly Apple's solution is lacking in many areas including just being half-baked and their enterprise support is non-existent. They have also never published their APIs to develop pam-DirectoryService and nss-DirectoryService for conventional Unix OS's, either, which is very short-sighted. So Apple's solution has promise, but tends to fall down outside of the base cases. But the standard alternatives are also very bad.
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I'm doubting that you have Kerberos properly implemented if you're having problems unifying authentication since that's the whole point of Kerberos. OpenLDAP for directory services and Kerberos for authentication works j
Re:Why not just use BSD then? (Score:4, Informative)
Please don't keep repeating that myth. OS X is built on a Mach core, with some bits and pieces of BSD hacked into it. And OS X has serious incompatibilities to BSD. If you're trying to use a BSD server with OS X clients, you have your work cut out for you.
Re:Why not just use BSD then? (Score:4, Insightful)
While eye candy is not necessary, I suppose, that doesn't mean it doesn't serve a productive purpose. For hardcore multitaskers, expose is a must - in a second you can pick the window you want out of the 20 that you have open.
But the thing that most often gets ignored in geek circles is the bling factor. We can't mathematically quantify any use for it, so we assume its useless and frown upon the simpleminded advocates of eye candy. Truth is, we're humans. We have an artistic side, and when our desktop interface is beautiful to use we're happier when we use it. I get more done when I'm in a good mood, and I'm in a better mood when my interface is entertaining and beautiful.
Necessary? No, but it enhances productivity. So it's only necessary if you want optimal productivity.
Not surprising that the computers most artists and musicians use sort of pioneered this.
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A smaller brother, both in size and power, to the MacPro, priced between the lowest and highest price iMac would probably be a very popular item they should add to their list. It could have one expansion slot and let the customer use their old PC keyboards and monitors. This would save money and help the environment with less electronic garbage to dispose of.
Apple could sell a sexy monitor, keyboard and mouse as an
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No matter how big the planet is, there's still fat people. This extends to operating systems as well.
Re:Server is not quite there yet.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Or conversely they could get out of the server market entirely. They do the consumer electronics thing very very well. They should continue to focus and improve on that, let some other company do the server thing well. Trying to be "all things computer" is a mistake. Apple has done well by ignoring the corporate world, and they should continue to do so. If they happen to have some proprietary architecture that would be a wonderful blessing to the server market, they can always lease the rights to Cisco.
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The reason to support servers is because of client/server compatibility. If a business/lab wants to have a bunch of servers and clients, likely they will want one vendor for both. Giving up on the server market means giving up on that chunk of the corporate/lab market. And since there is also a standardization among various departments...
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There are lots of things that Cisco would never make, but then they went and purchased Linksys.
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Great for Entrepeneurs (Score:5, Insightful)
All it would take is a shop to stock up on parts, offer extended care, data recovery and on-site services. In Manhattan there are a couple of shops that offer some of this, but they are mostly targetting users who don't want to ship their machine to apple or need a quick answer for unsupported systems (TekServe and others), but I don't feel that they are taking advantage of the corporate market.
I, being one of two apple users in my department, have realized that although apple has added the capability to join a windows domain, the SSO support is lacking and there are a couple of shortcomings in their implementation. Running a mac in a windows environment isn't quite as seemless in some critical places (SSO, as I said, but also browsing the network, connecting to sharepoint and if the network is flakey or goes down, logging back into the machine can take a long time if the machine has trouble communicating with the directory server). OSX also offers no default lock-screen option like windows does... Although you can have it "show login window" from the fast users witching menu, activating that with the keyboard requires 3rd party add-ons. I use Quicksilver's FastLogout option.
Re:Great for Entrepeneurs (Score:5, Informative)
Open Applications/Utilities/Keychain Access. Select Preferences, Show Status in Menu Bar.
Now anytime you want to lock the screen, just click on the padlock up by the clock and select Lock Screen.
This will require a password to exit the screen saver, even if you have your screen saver not set to require password.
I use Quicksilver's FastLogout option
FYI, fast user logout sans QuickSilver is Shift-Opt-Cmd-Q. (you have to hold the keys about 1/3 second)
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You can also go to System Preferences, Accounts and turn on fast user switching.
/Mikael
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I'm not in front of my mac at the moment, but I'm pretty sure that that keyboard shortcut logs you out-out... like... quits all applications, etc. no? Or, actually... maybe that keyboard shortcut is cmd-shift-q. I really need to look into that, because it would be very exciting if you're right.
if it just brings up the login screen, that would be awesome.
And, regarding the keychain-screensaver option, I'll
Re:Great for Entrepeneurs (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, it's not like Microsoft sticks to their roadmaps. But having a plan is comforting to Enterprise-types.
And yeah, they need to improve an OS X client to hook into a AD network. That should be relatively easy (even Microsoft did it).
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other than Intel I have yet to see a reliable software roadmap. Half the shit they just make up as they go, and drop it when it isn't possible.
Besides software roadmaps aren't meant to plan your business around. if that was the case more people would be upgrading to Vista. They are only for slowing down your competitors.
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Yeah, another great point.
I know when apple first switched to intel, everyone was happy to finally have an approximation as to what kinds of processors they'll see in the future since intel publishes their roadmaps and projections. Before, you had no idea what kind of chips they had in their labs (although, there were rumored 1ghz G3s before the G4 came out and 2ghz G4s before the G5 came out), and just because there were rumors, it didn't mean that those chips would ever see the light of day in
You confuse server with user roadmaps (Score:2)
For business USER (not server) use, what more do you need to know than what you can plan for already:
1) You know the web browser is roughly CSS compliant and will continue to be so.
2) You know how to integrate the existing OS X security infrastructure into your own to manage authenticatication and authorization
3) You know how to update groups of OS X systems.
4
Unfortunately (Score:5, Interesting)
My consultancy is currently working with several support companies who are starting to change their offered product mix. You would simply not believe how slow it is as the culture has to change, the training has to take place, the systems have to evolve. In my view, Apple is right to stay out. Eventually the wheel will turn and the fashion will revert to in house support. Then they will be in with a chance.
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Hrm?
Preferences > Security > "Require Password to Wake this computer from sleep or screen saver"
You can change the keyboard shortcut for sleeping the screen to Windows-L if it makes you feel better. I find setting a hot corner to be faster.
APPLE HAS NO MID-RANGE HEAD LESS DESKTOPS! (Score:5, Insightful)
The imac / mini are not that easy to be opened up and you can void the warranty by doing so. They also don't have send off a hard disk with data on it. HP and others let's you keep the bad hard disk and get a new one.
also the mini is not a good buy next to other systems at the same price and the mac pro is over kill for most users. AIO do not fit in to corporate use of systems and other AIO out there make it a lot easier to swap out HDD's as well.
A good $700-$2100 mid tower will be a nice fit in a corporate setting.
There laptops can use some work as well like an 15" screen at $1200-$1900 not $2000 and up.
Re:APPLE HAS NO MID-RANGE HEAD LESS DESKTOPS! (Score:5, Insightful)
I've been at a handful of Fortune 500 companies and my experience is exactly the opposite of yours. The desktop computer is dead, replaced by laptops which have lower TCO's and offer a better ROI. Apple would be wasting their time to build a mid-tower for this market as this market is small and getting much smaller.
What Apple really needs to compete in the corporate laptop market is a laptop dock. Most laptop users are sporting external monitors, mice, scanners, external storage and keyboards these days. Not having an easy way to hook and unhook all of that stuff twice a day is a deal killer.
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Send in the clones (Score:2, Insightful)
It's time for one of the major desktop manufacturers to cut a deal with Apple to make Mac desktop machines. It's time for Apple to exit desktops anyway; laptops are taking over in the personal market. But in business, where there are desks, desktops will be around for years to come. Since they're just x86 machines, there's no technical obstacle.
Psystar may be on to something.
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After all, it worked so well the last time (Score:2)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_clone#Official_Macintosh_clone_program [wikipedia.org]
Re:Send in the clones (Score:5, Funny)
Dear Slashdot Member 122034 ("Animats"),
It has been brought to my attention that you understand my business better than I do.
As you know, Slashdot is full of people who have far more opinions than money and far more enthusiasm for offering their opinions than for doing any real work.
Of course, I have no reason to believe that you are one of these foolish, idle creatures that can be seen pontificating on Web sites every minute of every day while able-minded people are accomplishing things.
Congratulations on having brilliant, instantaneous insights into my own affairs that I can only begin to understand after spending more than half my life in the computer industry and running one of the most successful electronics companies in the world.
I've instructed my assistants to alert me to any future guidance that you have time to offer.
Sincerely,
Steve Jobs
see this is why Apple is failing (Score:3, Funny)
So license the right to make "business macs" (Score:3, Insightful)
Adminware (Score:3, Insightful)
It's a matter of time. (Score:2)
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OS X (with the possible exception of Leopard Server (see above)) is perfectly fine for a small business. It works well with Windows (other than some flakiness with Active Directory which IT assures me that They Are Working On). They're great client machines assuming you aren't locked into some Windows only critical business software.
What Apple is ignoring is Big Business. Fortune xxx. Companies with Billions and Billions of dollars to spend on IT. Sure, lots of folks are
Secrecy is going to kill them (Score:5, Interesting)
Apple has to realize if they want to compete, they need to open up a bit to their larger buyers. Yes, the consumer market is great, but now that users are becoming apple savvy, you want them to have the opportunity to bring it to their workplace. Its a similar thing happening with Linux. My bosses were very anti Linux, but the latest batch of graduates have so much experience with it, its being rolled into our environment. You get people using it at home/school and they will want it at work.
Re:Secrecy is going to kill them (Score:4, Insightful)
You don't generate consumer buzz by talking about the things you're going to be releasing in, oh, five years or so. People forget about it and by the time it comes out it's already old news. Apple is much better off doing what they do now and letting the pressure of their consumer user base continue to help them in the work place.
Apple is growing. A few years ago the place where I work started offering Mac desktops and laptops for people who wanted those instead of a Dell. Judging from the amount of people I see walking into meetings with Macs I'd say that Apple has at least a 25% share at our business.
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Careful what you wish for... (Score:3, Interesting)
Once they reach the point where they have the focus of new malware they will almost immediately begin to lose their image as the secure system. A venture into the corporate world could invite attacks on their machines which would hurt their consumer offerings. If they were to lose their image as the easy AND safe machine it would completely change Apple marketing(which is very important to the company) and thus lose their fanatical base over a year or two.
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Hard choice to justify (Score:5, Insightful)
Excluding creative firms, most companies have a really short list of genuine requirements. Track a few gigabytes worth of numbers (total, across the company), deal with e-mail, exchange a few documents. You don't exactly need expose to do an accounts receivable reconciliation or fill out a goods received note yet _these are the things that most computer users do in most companies_.
Once you take user preference out of the equation what genuine benefits does Apple really offer? Linux offers commodity hardware sourcing plus no software overhead. Windows offers the same hardware advantage and conformity with the rest of the market. After you amortize setting up a standard, well locked down image over 10k+ users are the costs of that really different enough to be significant?
What companies should be doing is deploying Macs where they could really have some benefit. I'm sure that there are some people who need access to things like FCP at work are suffering an old Windows XP box with inadequate tools. But for every 1 of those people there are 20,000 people who right now are tapping out yet another form debt collection letter and could do it just as easily from a $200 box running Linux.
Re:Hard choice to justify (Score:5, Interesting)
2. Reliability, both HW and SW. (See my earlier posting on HW experiences.)
3. NO fscking viruses, spyware, etc to worry about. (When there's a real threat -and- a counter shown to be -safe and effective-, I'll buy it. Until then, no point screwing up the machine with anti-virus software that doesn't protect against any serious threats...)
4. Expertise on the platform. I can use Windows, but I'm much better on the Mac for GUI-like things, and when I need to, there's always the Terminal for all the Unix commands I know. (And Aquamacs is my preferred text editor, a great Mac port of Emacs...)
5. Ease of customization. This is related to ease of use, but is worthy of a comment itself. I can set things up the way I want to, in part because of the Mac's support for doing so, and in part because the corporate IT Nazis don't understand them well enough to prevent me... Don't get me started on Corporate IT departments, whose primary goal it seems to be to make everyone else's jobs harder to make their jobs easier; the opposite of 'service'...
6. Software/Hardware investment. I have -a lot- of stuff for the Mac, both commercial and shareware. Duplicating that in Windows would cost more than the computer itself.
When I changed jobs, I told my new boss that I did not want to use Windows. He responded, "Look, you get what makes -you productive-. You're the one making money for the company, not corporate IT."
All this dates to before the Intel Mac and the rise of virtualization. I have -one- customer application that I'm required to run on Windows. I also have occasional problems opening supposedly compatible Microsoft documents created on Windows Office on the Mac (but NewOffice usually opens them when Mac Office crashes... Go figure!)
I still don't understand why IT departments pay $$$$ for Exchange Server when the Open Source/Open Standards alternatives are
(a) A LOT cheaper
(b) A LOT more reliable
dave
Macs are here. (Score:5, Interesting)
From a support standpoint, the transition is a little rougher, as others here have noted, but the company is paying to have their support staff become Apple certified techs (myself included) in order to do the work in-house and keep our warranties intact.
The server side is also increasing, for the specific purpose of running the data ingest software used to manage clips for our HD transition.
Some of us have even messed around with the hacked OS X kernals floating around and I can report that it runs BEAUTIFULLY on a Dell GX520. If companies like Psystar are indeed a harbinger of things to come, I see Apple's market share in the corporate environment only continuing to rise.
Re:Macs are here. (Score:4, Interesting)
As I see it, Apple will die a quick death if companies like Psystar are a harbinger. Apple creates great software at cheap prices in order to sell hardware. In my mind that's a good business model because it's easier to control copying and theft of hardware than it is of software. Plus it allows OS X to be easy and user friendly to install, without a crippling and restrictive licensing/software key scheme.
And before some bozo says that means that Apple hardware is inferior I will point out that I have a house full of Macs that are several years old and still running great. The problem for me is that Apple hardware lasts too long. I want to get something new before the old one is actually worn out.
Mac hardware usually superior, not inferior... (Score:5, Insightful)
How this happened (Score:2)
MR DREARY BOSS IN A SUIT, SHIRT AND PLASTIC-COATED FEDORA: I don't know... XYZ Corp. has such a dreary image. I am certain it is affecting sales. Jenkins, what do you suggest?
MR LONG-SUFFERING, YOUNG, ENERGETIC JUNIOR: I know. You need to modernise. I suggest that after work today, you go to Dixons and buy an iPod.
MR DREARY: What's an iPod?
MR JUNIOR: It's like a gramophone that you can carry around with you. You can put Wagner and opera on it.
MR DREARY: OK, I'll try that. If it doesn't work, you're fi
Alternative to Intuit needed for SMB market (Score:4, Insightful)
Somewhat surprisingly, Intuit is very hostile to anything non-microsoft. The Mac version of quickbooks does not work very well. The online version of QB was specifically designed to not work with Linux. The enterprise version of QB is certified to run on certain linux distros, but that starts at $3000 USD, whereas the standard version of QB is $130 USD.
I am aware of the f/oss accounting apps, like gnucash, or ledgersmb, but none of those are adaquate for most SMBs. I think a viable alternative to QB would need a good sized company behind it.
Dear Apple (Score:5, Interesting)
Of the 4 new Macs I've worked on in the past year, 1 Macbook, 3 silver towers, 3 of the machines had hardware problems out of the box or within 1 week of unpacking. Specifically the broken speakers and dead Firewire ports. FIX YOUR QA PROBLEMS, CUPERTINO.
In the meantime I will be recommending HP, Lenovo or other for laptops and desktops.
Sincerely,
A Burned Customer.
PS - why is it called the "Genius Bar" if they are such idiots about these things?
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Under "Genius Bar Reservations", select from the popup-button a state & store.
Re:Dear Apple (Score:5, Informative)
I've worked at several companies that use Dell, HP, and Apple machines. We don't get any onsite service from any of them. When a machine breaks, we give the user a spare and ship the broken one back to the company. If the machine is functional enough, we migrated the data and config to the spare (where practical). I'm sure for big iron, this is different, but not for end user systems.
Your anecdotes are great and all, but according to objective, independent testing Apple hardware has lower failure rates for both laptops and desktops than, well any other major OEM. The only one close is Sony. We all have hardware problems occasionally, but I'm going to have to go with an objective, formal study from Consumer Reports and backed up by several other companies, when deciding which vendor has a QA problem.
Congrats on recommending hardware with lower reliability based upon your lack of research. P.S. Strangely Dell laptops are actually near the top of the heap for reliability, a big change from about a year ago. Hopefully anyone really making purchasing decisions for a living will actually do their homework.
Consumers go to work and brag (Score:3, Interesting)
That is why I cringe at Macs in schools because they aren't business computers and the cost of education is high enough without Apple making a buck. Again, these schools don't know what's best for them.
I'd say Linux is perfect for schools. It's free, it's a gateway to everything free, and it'll teach students how to work with computers better than any Mac or Windows will. The hardware can also be kept cheap.
They're going about it the right way (Score:3, Insightful)
I think the only thing that Apple would want to change is that corporate IT is afraid of getting support and repair calls they don't know how to handle. To a certain extent, this isn't a problem so long as employees only get Macs if they ask for them, because Apple puts a lot of effort into motivated individual users being able to take care of their Macs without a help desk. But they'll probably want to streamline the process of selling out-of-warranty repairs in large numbers for the same owner. And they may want to work on getting corporate IT workers to buy Macs as their home computers.
Good news for free OSs? (Score:2)
Status symbols (Score:2)
Apple Customer Service explained by the boss . . . (Score:3, Informative)
Apple vs. Java http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/05/03/1929212 [slashdot.org]
Apple Safari not ready for primetime (no anti-phishing) http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/03/03/2049205 [slashdot.org]
iphone SDK http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/04/16/1435254 [slashdot.org] and http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/04/08/1932232 [slashdot.org]
their treatment of Adobe (loss of Photoshop CS4 64bit) http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/04/04/1247246 [slashdot.org]
need I go on? And I only went back a month!
True Apple believers will stick their heads in the sand and ignore this long running trend of contempt for customers, but enterprises do notice, and remember bad behaviors from their suppliers. Until the corporate culture changes (and evidently this belief comes from the top) Apple does not belong in the enterprise.
Re:Apple Customer Service explained by the boss . (Score:3, Insightful)
Anti-phishing? Give me a break. Apple's managed to only take three point something years to turn off the default "allow browser to do stupid things if it asks first" flag. Which sounds pretty bad, and I've been ragging on them about it since 2004, but I've been waiting for Microsoft to do something about the "allow browser to do REALLY stu
Not one point right I see (Score:3, Interesting)
Apple vs. Java
Apple has always lagged a little behind Java. Clue for you: Companies lag even FURTHER behind. A lot of companies I know are not yet off Java 4!!
Apple Safari not ready for primetime (no anti-phishing)
If you really "read back" as you said, you'd have seen PayPal had no intention of banning Safari. It's not like anti-phishing stuff works all that well anyway or companies have a huge demand for it.
iphone SDK
Oh yeah, like lack of compatibility with OS
Mac OS X is a usable Unix with integrated hardware (Score:4, Interesting)
Which actually suprises me since Laptops are falling below the 500 Euro line regularly now. I wonder why nearly nobody hasn't built a cheap mac mini equivalent for the linux market yet.
That, however, could change quickly once prices drop below other barriers (Asus EEE anyone?). Once that happens, even Apple will have a tough time justifying a hermetic system, no matter how sleek it is.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
http://us.shuttle.com/KPC/ [shuttle.com]
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Apple in the workplace...again. (Score:3, Insightful)
So unless you're an executive vice-president or higher, or you're one of the rare people in "Creative" that has any pull at all with the boardroom, you're gonna be looking at Windows for a long time to come.
This is unfortunate, of course, but it's the Way Things Are. Especially in an economic downturn. Hell, you're lucky to have a job, so you might want to think twice before making a fuss about wanting a nice new Mac.
Totally A (Score:3, Interesting)
Then I can frag during coffee breaks.
I love the smell... (Score:3, Funny)
Or do we simply call it fear of 'something I know nothing about'?
"Mac bad! Beat on Mac! Me no like, want smash! Get away! Make scared! No understand!"
Games moving off computers (Score:5, Insightful)
Some console games even support mouse/keyboard for FPS control.
With HD TV even just at 720p, you have resolution that is acceptable to just about anyone, and you don't have to do all the work of updating drivers and such - the platforms handle updates quite well as to the games.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't think one can really fault Jobs for first targeting "people who take photos", "people who listen to music", etc. over "people who play Half Life".
I welcome reasonable standards. (Score:2, Insightful)
With significant Mac deployments in big companies, Microsoft only stuff won't fly. This is not as good as free software deployment but it's helpful. Increasing choice of tools in big companies is good for everyone but everyone's least favorite monopoly.
As long as common dissasters like Flash are used in all platforms, the diversity will only create marginal security improvements.